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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
avoiding the fallacies of distributed computing, 22 May 2007
The book's scope is how to build computer systems when networks are unreliable, latency is large, bandwidth constrained, the network is insecure, the topology changes, there are many administrators, transport is expensive, the network varies.
The book is a textbook taking you from a general background up to a solid foundation in all aspects of distributed computing. Examples are given from current and historical standards and implementations, with the pros and cons of each. Throughout there are references to the original papers and researchers allowing individual topics to be researched in more detail.
This is not a how-to-code book, instead it deals with the design constraints in the real world.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the best..., 10 Oct 2004
This review is from: Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (Hardcover)
...books for distributed systems theory. There are many issues presented in a clear concise and easy to understand manner and it is this fact that makes a complex topic area look very easy. A very highly recommended book for any student learning distributed systems.
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Horribly written, 9 Dec 2006
By Arturo DiGenero - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (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, 28 April 2002
By T. Bass "Tim Bass" - Published on Amazon.com
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..., 3 Jun 2005
By Thomas Vaughan - Published on Amazon.com
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.
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