Queueing Methods for Services and Manufacturing
Randolph W. Hall, 1991

I am reading 4-6 books at any given moment. They range from easy fiction reads to dense technical books, and I read the book that matches my mood and attention span at the time. This summer, I added textbooks to my reading rotation. This is the first textbook I’ve read outside the bounds of a structured class.

This book provides a good overview of options available to diagnose and fix queueing issues. Whether queues are perpetual, predictable, or stochastic, the book discusses them at length. It’s written more for practitioners than academics, in that there are practical diagnostic tools and suggestions for improvement instead of theorems and proofs. There is a good discussion of Little’s Law and steady-state analysis, for those interested in introductory stochastic analysis of queueing systems. I think this is a good book for practitioners and perhaps analytical MBAs, but I don’t know if it dives deep enough into the theoretical backing to be extremely useful for academics. I am glad I read it to get a stronger queueing background, though, and I will reference some of its simpler results and its results on steady-state approximations.