Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms [Hardcover]

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Author), Maarten van Steen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130888931 | ISBN-13: 978-0130888938 | Publication Date: January 15, 2002 | Edition: US ed

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. Distributed systems are common. Computer scientists and engineers need to understand how the principles and paradigms underlying distributed systems software and be familiar with several real world examples. No other book systematically examines the underlying principles and how they are applied to a wide variety of distributed systems with the depth and clarity of this presentation.

Editorial Reviews

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.

FEATURES

• 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 an S.B. degree from M.LT. 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 is head of the Computer Systems Department. He is also the 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. This research is being done together with Dr. Maarten van Steen. Together, all his research projects have led to over 90 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings and five books.

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.

His Ph.D. students have gone on to greater glory after getting their degrees. He is very proud of them. In this respect he resembles a mother hen.

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. His home page on the World Wide Web can be found at URL http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/.

Maarten van Steen is currently an associate 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.

Dr. van Steen studied Applied Mathematics at Twente University and received a Ph.D. from Leiden University in the field of software design techniques for concurrent systems. After his graduate studies he went to work for an industrial research laboratory where he eventually became head of the Computer Systems 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 in Amsterdam. Going back to university was the right decision; his wife thinks so too.

His current research concentrates on large-scale wide-area distributed systems, with an emphasis on locating mobile objects, system architecture, and adaptive distribution and replication. Together with prof. Tanenbaum he leads the Globe project in which a group of approximately a dozen researchers collaborate to develop a wide-area distributed system by the same name. The Globe system is described at http://www.cs.vu.nl/globe.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 803 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; US ed edition (January 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130888931
• ISBN-13: 978-0130888938
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,158,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horribly written, December 8, 2006

By 

Arturo DiGenero - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)

I enjoyed and learned a lot from both of Tanenbaum's OS textbooks, but this is really awful. On the one hand, the descriptions of things such as RPC are so abstract that I can't see how anyone could be expected to understand what a real RPC system would look like; on the other hand, there's not nearly enough effort made to give a picture of how the systems discussed fit into the broader context of computer science, or relate to each other.

Moreover, the book is badly written: the writing is alternately overly colloquial and overly academic in style, as if it were written by someone very smart, but for whom English is a second language.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Distributed Computing Reference, April 27, 2002

By 

T. Bass "Tim Bass" (Palo Alto, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (Hardcover)

Tanenbaum and van Steen have updated their textbooks on networks and distributed systems to include chapters on Distributed Document-Based Systems (examples: The World Wide Web / Lotus Notes) and Distributed Coordination-Based Systems (examples: TIBCO/Rendezvous / JINI). There are other good chapters as well, including; Security, Distributed Object-Based Systems, Distributed File Systems, Fault Tolerance, Consistency & Replication, and more. I have always liked Tanenbaum's textbooks and picked this one up for a textbook discussion of TIBCO/Rendezvous because of my work in federated information systems. The chapter on TIBCO discusses the coordination model, architecture, messaging, events, processes, naming, synchronization, caching, replication, fault tolerance and security. There is a similar discussion on JINI and a follow-up comparative analysis of TIBCO/Rendezvous and JINI. In short, this book is an excellent reference for people of all experience and education levels working with distributed systems. Like all Tanenbaum's books, Distributed Systems is well written and easy to read. Highly Recommended!

27 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Yikes! Avoid this one..., June 2, 2005

By 

Thomas Vaughan (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (Hardcover)

I agree with another reviewer: this book is not worth reading for its prose. The cover got my hopes up--perhaps this would be an irreverant, clever review of the many mistakes and learnings as we have explored the strange new world of distributed computing over the last several years. Something like Gregory Pfister's excellent "In Search of Clusters" (ASIN 0138997098).

Instead, this is a very turgid, encyclopedic survey of the topic, without much to guide the reader. For instance, distributed object-based systems are very old, why doesn't Tanenbaum mention their myriad problems? NFS, with its attempt to make remote filesystems look local, and extensive kernel hooks, can be very painful to use and operate. You would not want to write a distributed file system like NFS today! How was that not mentioned? Instead, this book treats all distributed systems as if they had equal worth and utility, with dry comparisons of features, and no sense of what the core lessons of distributed computing have been.

This is obviously one book in a chain aimed at the academic market. Perhaps it has a place there, but I wouldn't want to be a in a class that used this book.