Distributed Systems 3rd edition (2017)

You can get a digital (personalized) copy of this book for free.

PPT slides now available

This page refers to the 3rd edition of Distributed Systems

For this third edition of “Distributed Systems,” the material has been thoroughly revised and extended, integrating principles and paradigms into nine chapters:

  1. Introduction
  2. Architectures
  3. Processes
  4. Communication
  5. Naming
  6. Coordination
  7. Replication
  8. Fault tolerance
  9. Security

A separation has been made between basic material and more specific subjects. The latter have been organized into boxed sections, which may be skipped on first reading.

To assist in understanding the more algorithmic parts, example programs in Python have been included. The examples in the book leave out many details for readability, but the complete code is available. All suggestions for improvements are welcome.

You can order a printed version of the book through Amazon.com. Please refer to the book (when you need to cite it) as:

M. van Steen and A.S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Systems, 3rd ed., distributed-systems.net, 2017.

Additional material

  • I have redesigned the course to encourage more critical thinking than just learning by the book.
  • All figures are available in three formats, packaged as zip files:
  • A set of slides. These slides cover all the material from the book, except for Chapter 9.
    • All slides, per chapter, in PPT or in PDF
    • The LaTeX sources along with some (minimal) instructions
  • The source code of the Python examples. Please download the Redis package separately
    • I’ve also included a brief guide to the channel package