Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design

This book useful for one who is wanting an introduction to distributed systems. The book covers a lot of topics and can be a very long read. The earlier chapters on networking and long and verbose. The later chapters give a good description of distributed systems concepts but doesn't dive in to deep.

I bought the book in few months but already knew. These book is excelente and a best seller, the concepts are shows and have several examples about distributed systems such CORBA, WEB services, RMI, etc. I really have it by my side ever. Such a distributed systems software enginerring is very good to know theirs concepts abroad this area.

I use this book as a teacher, I find it very complete and simple to understand, RMI examples are fine and good to improve the learning about distributed systemps. I'm giving this book 4 stars, this book is good and perfect as an introductory learning but I have had often to complement the content using another books as well (like Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition))

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 p

This book takes on quite a lot of material and covers all topics quite well. As an introduction to Distributed Systems it serves as an excellent first-base and covers very current technologies such as ATM. The networking protocols section (especially for Ethernet & Token Ring) is outstanding and very well designed, while the emphasis through the text on transparency ties things together quite neatly.The strength of this book lies in its no-nonsense approach to technical issues while remaining very considerate to the reader. A great text and hopefully the next edition will include some sections on CORBA and other object-based technologies.Thouroughly recommended