Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (4th Edition) [Hardcover]

Jean Dollimore (Author), Tim Kindberg (Author), George Coulouris (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321263545 | ISBN-13: 978-0321263544 | Publication Date: May 20, 2005 | Edition: 4

Provides a broad and up-to-date account of the principles and practice of distributed system design.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Concepts and Design

 

Fourth Edition

 

George Coulouris   Jean Dollimore   Tim Kindberg

'This book is simply the standard by which all other Distributed Systems texts are measured.' 

Amazon.co.uk review of the third edition

From mobile phones to the Internet, our lives depend increasingly on distributed systems linking computers and other devices together in a seamless and transparent way. The fourth edition of this best-selling text continues to provide a comprehensive source of material on the principles and practice of distributed computer systems and the exciting new developments based on them, using a wealth of modern case studies to illustrate their design and development.

 

Highlights of the fourth edition include:

 

Ø      Three entirely new chapters on peer-to-peer systems, web services, and mobile and ubiquitous systems.

Ø      More than 25 detailed case studies of well-known systems, eight of them new, including studies of the Grid, Cooltown, Bluetooth andthe (in)security of the WiFi WEP protocol.

Ø      Updated coverage of XML and its security extensions, the Advanced Encryption Standard and security design for ubiquitous systems.

 

Distributed Systems provides students of computer science and engineering with the skills they will need to design and maintain software for distributed applications. It will also be invaluable to software engineers and systems designers wishing to understand new and future developments in the field.

 

George Coulouris is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Jean Dollimore was, until her retirement, Senior Lecturer in computer science at Queen Mary College, Universityof London. Tim Kindberg is a Senior Researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol.

 

Check out www.cdk4.net or www.pearsoned.co.uk/coulouris for a rich set of resources for students and instructors, including:

Ø      The book bibliography with links to relevant online references.

Ø      PowerPoint teaching slides.

Ø      Presentation guidelines for instructors.

Ø      Solutions to all exercises (for instructors only).

Ø      Material from previous editions that will not fit in this one.

Ø      Source code for all program listings.

Ø      Links to many courses using the book.

Ø      A carefully maintained errata list ¿ and more!

 

About the Author

George Coulouris is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Jean Dollimore was, until her retirement, Senior Lecturer in computer science at Queen Mary College, University of London. Tim Kindberg is a Senior Researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol. Gordon Blair is a Professor in the Lancaster University Computing Department. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 944 pages
• Publisher: Addison Wesley; 4 edition (May 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321263545
• ISBN-13: 978-0321263544
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #164,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lots of content - but very wordy and reader unfriendly, December 8, 2005

By 

Comp Sc. Instructor "CSI" (TX, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (4th Edition) (Hardcover)

I had adopted this book to teach Distributed Systems to a senior level undergrad class. I think I may have made a mistake, not knowing before hand how hard it would be for me to read this book (despite having some background in distributed systems). The students constantly complained of it being too "Wordy" and "vague". Few generic figures and mostly all text that seemed to be a rehash of several IEEE/ACM papers without giving sufficient examples or explanation. Some times, the authors did indeed explain some concepts with examples. At other times, they just left the concepts in vague mathematical notation or arcane definitions expecting the readers to make sense of it. While the english is grammatically correct, it is written in such a stuffy academic style that I found myself having to read most paragraphs twice or thrice before I could figure out what the author was trying to say. At times, I was thinking the authors should have been lawyers instead. (If the authors are reading this .. please consider the maxim: A picture is indeed worth a thousand words). A side note: I am not averse to reading academic papers. I do that all day long. But I just don't think a textbook should be written in that style.

On the pro side: This book has lots of content related to distributed systems - and that was one of the reasons I adopted it. However, what's the point if that content is unreadable? My recommendation would be other books such as Tanenbaums Distributed Systems book (it has lesser content, but more readable and suited for undergraduate level).

I give it high marks for the good content, but very low marks for the style of narration and presentation.

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Merely an introduction to Networking concepts, June 19, 2004

By 

Rohit Vishwakarma (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

This book mostly explains networking concepts from a point of view of MIS people. I did not find this very useful from a programming concepts point of view, For example book does not explains the fundamental of distributed transactions, concurrency and replication of distributed data. To me it feels like networking concepts and database concepts were merged in one single book. Book in general attempts to covers a wide variety of topics. It is not very useful if you are a serious programmer in Corba or transaction management.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good book for distributed systems., November 10, 2004

By 

Chongjie Zhang "Jacob" (Baton Rouge, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

As the awareness of resource sharing and cooperation has increased, distributed systems have gained unprecedented attention. However, designing a practical distributed application is a demanding and complicated task. Coulouris et al. have excellently addressed this design issue with Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design. This book covers various topics from fundamental concepts and principles of distributed systems to some advanced topics, such as replication and distributed multimedia systems. For each topic, the authors provide information in sufficient depth and breadth for readers to conduct further research.

The strength of the book lies in efficiently using practical examples to explain the underlying principles of distributed systems. Helpful case studies are placed throughout the book. Another characteristic of the book is its successful and extensive use of comparison and contrast to make concepts clear.

The book has eighteen chapters and each chapter is well-organized, starting with an introduction and ending with a summary. Although the authors indicate that the book is organized into five main topic areas, the actual organization is not so intuitive and consistent with those topic areas. For example, Chapter 5, 7, and 9 discuss middleware of distributed systems, but Chapter 6 and 8 talk about system infrastructure. So I think it may be better to pick and choose each topic area, instead of following the actual organization of the book.

The first four chapters of the book offer the prerequisite knowledge and fundamental concepts of distributed systems. The authors introduce the characterization of distributed systems (Chapter 1), system models of distributed systems (Chapter 2), networks that distributed systems run on (Chapter 3), and communication protocols between processes in distributed systems (Chapter 4). These chapters are basic for understanding the following chapters.

The second topic area is the middleware of distributed systems. This part covers interaction between distributed objects (Chapter 5), security in distributed systems (Chapter 7), and name services (Chapter 9). Chapter 17 offers a detailed CORBA case study to help reader better understand previous chapters about distributed middleware.

The third topic area is distributed operating systems. Although the author talks about various subareas of distributed operating systems, such as distributed file systems (Chapter 8), distributed multimedia systems (Chapter 15), and distributed shared memory (Chapter 16), the book could have included a very important part of distributed operating systems - distributed scheduling.

It is a good choice to gather distributed algorithms as an independent part, although these algorithms are used by other topic areas. Chapter 10 describes the algorithms related to time and global states, and Chapter 11 describes those related to coordination and agreement.

The final part of the book covers data sharing. In this part, Coulouris et al. first introduce the basic concepts of transaction (Chapter 12), then extends them to distributed transactions (Chapter 13). With distributed transactions, the authors discuss data replication.

Coulouris et al.'s coverage of distributed systems provides sufficient knowledge to evaluate distributed systems or design new ones. Although there is minor problem with the organization of the book, I strongly recommend it as a textbook for an advanced undergraduate course, an introductory postgraduate course, or merely as a self-study reference.