This is yet another marvelously written book from Andrew Tenanbaum. The book is divided into 6 main chapters followed by 4 case studies of distributed systems. The first chapter is an introduction to distributed systems. It defines a distributed operating system, the goals of a distributed operating system, associated hardware and software concepts and the design issues.
Chapter 2 deals with communication in distributed systems and talks about the protocols(OSI), ATM, client-server model, Remote procedure calls and group communication.
The 3rd chapter deals with synchronization in distributed systems and discusses mutual exclusion, election algorithms, atomic transactions and deadlocks.
Chapter 4 deals with processes and processors in distributed systems and gives information about threads, system models, processor allocation. Scheduling, fault tolerance and real-time distributed systems.
Chapter 5 deals with distributed file systems and discusses file system design, implementation and latest trends in distributed file systems.
The 7th chapter talks about distributed shared memory and gives information about shared memory, consistency models, types of distributed shared memory.
Chapters 7-10 are case studies of distributed systems. The first of these is AMOEBA which was designed by the author( Andrew Tenanbaum) and his team. The others are MACH, CHORUS and DCE. Each of the case studies has a brief introduction and goes on to discuss the details of each system.
This book is not meant for amateurs. A certain amount of prerequisite knowledge is a must. We had this subject in the 7th semester of Computer Engineering course so that shows how much knowledge we already had about computers at that time. Easily understandable explanation is a trademark of books by this author and this book is no exception.
At places there is some humor too. Each chapter has a summary and associated problem set. The problem sets are interesting and thought-provoking. The drawback is the lack of a solution manual. All in all, an excellent introduction into the world of distributed systems for computer engineers in the making. Plus points 1)Excellent explanation 2)Reasonably priced( Rs 350) Minus points 1) Needs a solution manual
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