Keep in mind this book is really just a large collection of core papers. If you are looking for something more structured as a how-to of developing DBs this is useful as a reference but not the best introduction.
If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are:
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter)
Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum)
Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.
Also if you are interested in B-Trees start with "The Ubiquitous B-Tree" by Comer. [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 ].