17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
definite reference, March 22, 2003
This review is from: Distributed Algorithms (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Hardcover)
Professor's Nancy Lynch's "Distributed Algorithms" is a definite reference for theoretical treatments of many hard problems in distributed computing. It is a textbook, but written in such a clear style that makes it almost a pleasure read. Rarely have I seen something like that! The book has a right proportion of theoretical proofs, practical applications, philosophical appreciation of the problems, research questions, examples and study points.
"Distributed Algorithms" has 3 main parts - synchronous, asynchronous and partially synchronous network algorisms. Each part describes consensus resolution, mutual exclusion, resource allocation, leader election, termination detection and failure detection as main problems in distributed computing theory. Lynch has done a masterful job of leading us from simple to complex, from theoretically solvable to practically intractable problems.
For a practitioner of computer science, who is not necessarily involved in fundamental research, this book gives a clear appreciation of problems of 2PC, resource management, failure profiles in faulty and noisy networks, optimization and fault management in distributed networks. All those things are foundations of databases, network computing and enterprise scalability. It also helped me greatly in estimating the best and worst case boundaries in certain practical distributed system optimization problems.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The original printed book is great, but the technical quality of the Kindle edition is extremely poor, February 20, 2012
This book is a classic, and I was excited when I learned that this excellent reference work is also available as a Kindle edition.
Unfortunately, the technical quality of the Kindle version is extremely poor. In particular, many parts of it are very difficult to follow because of several technical errors that have been introduced in the conversion of the printed book into Kindle edition.
The Kindle edition is barely useful as a reference if you already have read the printed book, and just want to quickly look up some definitions or references. Trying to read any non-trivial fragment of the Kindle version is a painful experience.
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I am giving here just some examples of the issues that should have been easy to spot before publishing the Kindle version of the book.
Throughout the book, there are numerous strange errors in mathematical formulas. There are confusing mistakes such as using $o(n)$ instead of $O(n)$, or replacing the floor notation with brackets "[...]", or replacing the $\ge$ symbol with text "VI". In many places, the book uses $\epsilon$ instead of $\in$, "U" instead of $\cup$, "V" instead of $\vee$, "." instead of $\cdot$, etc.
There are lots of alignment issues; superscripts and subscripts are often lost. Spacing is wrong, for example, there is often "O (n log n)" instead of "O(n log n)" or "O (logn)" instead of "O(log n)". Hyphens and minus signs are wildly mixed up even within a single paragraph of text. In general, you can expect all kinds of mistakes that happen when you try to apply OCR to mathematical formulas, without carefully proofreading the end result.
Many text fragments - more complicated formulas, algorithm listings, etc. - seem to be low-resolution scanned images. There is a lot of noise in the figures, and the font size in the figures is tiny, making subscripts and superscripts very difficult to read. The alignment of text with respect to the scanned images is poor, making the formulas even more difficult to follow.
All illustrations are also low-resolution scans.
The OCR mistakes are not confined to mathematical formulas. For example, there are mistakes such as replacing the word "component's" with "component-s".
In general the whole volume gives the impression of very sloppy work. Some figures have not been correctly cropped, and there are fragments of surrounding text still visible. The structure of the text (indentations, bullets, etc.) is lost in many places. The use of colours is distracting. Even the hyperlinks are wrong in some places - a sample input in an exercise has been turned into a list of hyperlinks into text chapters. The last page claims that there is also a web version, but the activation system does not seem to recognise this book.
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The original printed book is very well typeset, and it is really sad to see what the publisher has done when they prepared the Kindle edition.
I would have expected that the electronic sources of the original book would have been available; the book is not that old. Nevertheless, it seems that the publisher has just scanned a printed copy of the book, ran it through OCR, and done some rudimentary clean-up. In particular, it seems that nobody has actually bothered to proof-read the end result carefully.
Yet they are selling the Kindle version for > 100 USD...
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18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First class thing. I wish all I have to read were that good, November 7, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Distributed Algorithms (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Hardcover)
This book is in the same class as "Discrete mathematics" by Knuth and others. Important topic, extensive coverage, good English, zero vendor's propaganda. Super. An unexpected gift from up above (after struggling with reams of MS's (dis) information <g>.) I am working on something distributed and ran into this book accidentally, while browsing in a bookstore--I'm glad I did. Btw, it's a few bucks cheaper in B&N store (here goes my review <g>.)
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