Review
"This is a unique, ambitious, and important book. It is about computer system design principles, and not the usual mechanics of how things work. These principles are typically embedded in research papers (for those of which are to be found at all), and no book I know of makes so many of them explicit and its focal point." -Joe Pasquale, UC San Diego
"The book is a great introduction to system design issues that are only taught at few courses in few universities, even-though they show up in computer systems everywhere. This is a very good and easy read for any one in computer industry. It describes all parts of computer systems and how they interact very well. The extension of the book is online and many chapters are available for free to download. The chapter on Naming is worth the money of the book. I have not seen the discussion of naming in such detail and simple terms anywhere. The authors are very well respected professors at MIT and have experience in operating systems and computer system since its early days. I highly recommend this book to any hardware or software student or professional engineer."--Amazon.com 5 star review THE missing link, January 16, 2010 By clivebaker "clivebaker"
"[A] unique of several design patterns that are used as building blocks in computer systems. The primary novelty in Saltzer and Kaashoek's book is the fresh and original presentation of several related topics. The book is logically divided into two parts: Part 1 is included in the hard-copy book; Part 2 is only available online.. I highly recommend this well-written and well-structured book to several groups of readers: undergraduate students can use it as a gentle introduction to computer architecture and OSs, and graduate students and more advanced readers will enjoy its philosophical and design-oriented aspects. In fact, the book may eventually become a classic and a must-read for any computer scientist."--Computing Reviews
From the Back Cover
Principles of Computer System Design
An Introduction
JEROME H. SALTZER
M. FRANS KAASHOEK
Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction is the first book to identify, examine, and illustrate the fundamental principles and abstractions in computer system design that are common across operating systems, networks, database systems, distributed systems, programming languages, software engineering, and computer architecture. Through carefully analyzed case studies from each of these disciplines, it demonstrates how to apply these principles and abstractions to tackle real system design problems. To support the focus on design, the book identifies and explains abstractions that have proven successful in practice such as, names, remote procedure call, client/service organization, file systems, transactions, replication with repair, read/write coherence, and authenticated and confidential messages. These abstractions allow designers to compose systems with increasingly strong modularity, to protect against failures ranging from accidental programmer errors to malicious adversaries. This book describes how these abstractions are implemented, demonstrates how they are used in different systems, and prepares the reader to apply them in future designs.
F E A T U R E S
- Formulates and illustrates the main principles (see list on inside cover) of computer system design.
- Presents a cross-disciplinary approach drawing on examples from networking, operating systems, distributed systems, architecture and other disciplines within computer science.
- Explores principles and abstractions in-depth with numerous case studies, including Unix (file systems); URL, DNS (naming); NFS (client/service); virtual machines (virtualization); disk arms (scheduling); TLS (security).
- Illustrates core concepts using numerous pseudocode examples throughout the text.
- Supports on-line open educational resources that include several additional chapters and problem sets, plus MIT Open CourseWare materials, including lecture videos.
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S
Jerome H. Saltzer has been a faculty member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT since 1966. Prof. Saltzer helped to formulate the undergraduate curriculum in Computer Science at MIT, and developed the core subject on computer systems engineering.
M. Frans Kaashoek is a professor in MIT's EECS department and a member of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he co-leads the parallel and distributed operating systems group (http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/) and is in charge of the subject on computer systems engineering.
