May 23

Distributed Systems Reading List

Category: Distributed Systems

I realized a while ago that I have this bunch of material I keep to hand at all times - thought it might be worth sharing. It’s in the sidebar on the right. I’ll be adding to it over time, for a start there’s some stuff over on my website that should be in there.

Enjoy.

Update: Added some more links and fixed all the one’s the stupid HTML editor didn’t correctly tag, mutter.

2 Comments so far

  1. David Peterson May 30th, 2007 3:37 pm

    Hi Dan

    Can I suggest also:

    - FLP
    - Gregor Hohpe’s recent article “Your coffee shop doesn’t use two phase commit”
    - Brooks’ paper “No silver bullet”

    Also Ken Birman recently released his book “Distributed Programming” which provides a good coverage of the main topics in the field. Ken is the author of the Horus and ISIS multicast group communication systems as well as more recent bi-modal multicast (probabilistic broadcast) algorithm. Also there’s the Tanenbaum and van Steen text of the same name that provides a reasonable coverage also (albeit a couple of years older).

    Also I notice your list is silent on P2P infrastructures, they’re DS’s too :) (Much as some of our academic colleages would like not to think so!). Maybe some of the seminal papers on DHTs or P2P overlays could be useful?

    And distributed file systems (though I noticed you had the GCS paper). Maybe something on AFS or CODA?

    It’s a good idea to build a list like this. I might start my own and we can compare notes soon. ;)

    Dave

    Not one for your list, but have you seen:
    http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

    As a Java hacker I am sure you will appreciate it ;)

  2. Dan Creswell May 30th, 2007 9:44 pm

    Added FLP (need a free to view version) and the hohpe paper. Brooks I’d reserve for a list of “engineering fundamentals”. On Birman, he’s written some interesting stuff but I’ve heard mixed reports in respect of his book (haven’t read it) and I’m not too keen on Tanenbaum I’ll think about book references a bit more but it feels a little like overkill for now.

    In respect of P2P good point, I have some good references (including some stuff by Birman I believe) which I’ll dig out. On filesystems, maybe though I don’t recall reading anything that I’d say was obviously a candidate, another review due I think.

    And I’ll make sure to check out kingdom of nouns (nope, not come across it before, shame on me)

    Thanks for the feedback most useful.