Product Description

For courses on Distributed Systems, Distributed Operating Systems, and Advanced Operating Systems focusing on distributed systems, found in departments of Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Very few textbooks today explore distributed systems in a manner appropriate for university students. In this unique text, esteemed authors Tanenbaum and van Steen provide full coverage of the field in a systematic way that can be readily used for teaching. No other text examines the underlying principles – and their applications to a wide variety of practical distributed systems – with this level of depth and clarity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118821 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

From the Back Cover

Andrew Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen cover the principles, advanced concepts, and technologies of distributed systems in detail, including: communication, replication, fault tolerance, and security. Intended for use in a senior/graduate level distributed systems course or by professionals, this text systematically shows how distributed systems are designed and implemented in real systems. Written in the superb writing style of other Tanenbaum books, the material also features unique accessibility and a wide variety of real-world examples and case studies, such as NFS v4, CORBA, DCOM, Jini, and the World Wide Web.

• Detailed coverage of seven key principles.
  An introductory chapter followed by a chapter devoted to each key principle: communication, processes, naming, synchronization, consistency and replication, fault tolerance, and security, including unique comprehensive coverage of middleware models.
• Four chapters devoted to state-of-the-art real-world examples of middleware.
  Covers object-based systems, document-based systems, distributed file systems, and coordination-based systems including Corba, DCOM, Globe, NFS v4, Coda, the World Wide Web, and Jini.
• Excellent coverage of timely, advanced distributed systems topics:
  Security, payment systems, recent Internet and Web protocols, scalability, and caching and replication.
• NEW—The Prentice Hall Companion Website for this book contains PowerPoint slides, figures in various file formats, and other teaching aids, and a link to the author's Web site. Please visit http://www.prenhall.com/tanenbaum.

About the Author

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has a B.S. Degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Systems Group. He is also Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems. Nevertheless, he is trying very hard to avoid turning into a bureaucrat.

In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, and local-area distributed systems. His current research focuses primarily on the design of wide-area distributed systems that scale to a billion users. These research projects have led to five books and over 85 referred papers in journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software. He was the principal architect of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, a widely-used toolkit for writing portable compilers, as well as of MINIX, a small UNIX clone intended for use in student programming labs. Together with his Ph.D. students and programmers, he helped design the Amoeba distributed operating system, a high-performance microkernel-based distributed operating system. The MINIX and Amoeba systems are now available for free via the Internet.

Prof. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and winner of the 1997 ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He is also listed in Who’s Who in the World.

Maarten van Steen  is a professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam where he teaches operating systems, computer networks, and distributed systems. He has also given various highly successful courses on computer systems related subjects to ICT professionals from industry and governmental organizations.

Prof. van Steen studied Applied Mathematics at Twente University and received a Ph.D. from Leiden University in Computer Science. After his graduate studies he went to work for an industrial research laboratory where he eventually became head of a group concentrating on programming support for parallel applications.

After five years of struggling to simultaneously do research and management, he decided to return to academia, first as an assistant professor in Computer Science at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and later as an assistant professor in Andrew Tanenbaum's group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

His current research concentrates on large-scale distributed systems. Part of his research focusses on Web-based systems, in particular adaptive distribution and replication in (collaborative) content distribution networks. Another subject of extensive research is fully decentralized (gossip based) peer-to-peer systems for wired as well as wireless ad hoc networks.

Customer Reviews

avoiding the fallacies of distributed computing
The book's scope is how to build computer systems when networks are unreliable, latency is large, bandwidth constrained, the network is insecure, the topology changes, there are many administrators, transport is expensive, the network varies.

The book is a textbook taking you from a general background up to a solid foundation in all aspects of distributed computing. Examples are given from current and historical standards and implementations, with the pros and cons of each. Throughout there are references to the original papers and researchers allowing individual topics to be researched in more detail.

This is not a how-to-code book, instead it deals with the design constraints in the real world.

one of the best...
...books for distributed systems theory. There are many issues presented in a clear concise and easy to understand manner and it is this fact that makes a complex topic area look very easy. A very highly recommended book for any student learning distributed systems.

Excellent
have a good abstract of everything to anyone who are new to this topic..NETWORK programming. In general is a good book to own.