Computer Science · Distributed Systems
A topic within Distributed Systems, itself one of 13 topics in that field and part of Computer Science.
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Distributed Systems
Maarten van Steen & Andrew S. Tanenbaum · 2001
Teaches distributed systems around a small set of recurring problems - naming, communication, coordination, consistency and fault tolerance - rather…
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Primary sources and full treatments.
MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems
Robert Morris (MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems) · 2020
Teaches distributed systems through the papers that defined them — GFS, Raft, Spanner — arguing that fault tolerance and consistency are the same…
3 works
Maarten van Steen & Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Teaches distributed systems around a small set of recurring problems - naming, communication, coordination, consistency and fault tolerance - rather than as a tour of unrelated case studies.
600 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJeffrey Dean & Sanjay Ghemawat
Shows that a huge class of data-processing jobs can be expressed as two functions, letting the runtime handle parallelism, failure and data placement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRobert Morris (MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems)
Teaches distributed systems through the papers that defined them — GFS, Raft, Spanner — arguing that fault tolerance and consistency are the same problem approached from two directions.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy