Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition) [Hardcover]

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

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0132392275 | ISBN-13: 978-0132392273 | Publication Date: October 12, 2006 | Edition: 2

Virtually every computing system today is part of a distributed system. Programmers, developers, and engineers need to understand the underlying principles and paradigms as well as the real-world application of those principles. Now, internationally renowned expert Andrew S. Tanenbaum – with colleague Martin van Steen – presents a complete introduction that identifies the seven key principles of distributed systems, with extensive examples of each. Adds a completely new chapter on architecture to address the principle of organizing distributed systems. Provides extensive new material on peer-to-peer systems, grid computing and Web services, virtualization, and application-level multicasting. Updates material on clock synchronization, data-centric consistency, object-based distributed systems, and file systems and Web systems coordination. For all developers, software engineers, and architects who need an in-depth understanding of distributed systems.

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has a B.S. Degree from M.I.T. 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 heads the Computer Systems Group. He is also 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. These research projects have led to five books and over 85 referred papers in journals and conference proceedings.

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.

 

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.

 

Maarten van Steen  is a 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.

 

Prof. van Steen studied Applied Mathematics at Twente University and received a Ph.D. from Leiden University in Computer Science. After his graduate studies he went to work for an industrial research laboratory where he eventually became head of a 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 Amsterdam.

 

His current research concentrates on large-scale distributed systems. Part of his research focusses on Web-based systems, in particular adaptive distribution and replication in (collaborative) content distribution networks. Another subject of extensive research is fully decentralized (gossip based) peer-to-peer systems for wired as well as wireless ad hoc networks.

 

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 704 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 2 edition (October 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132392275
• ISBN-13: 978-0132392273
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,943 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
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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.