Resources

Here is a list of resources that you may find helpful throughout the semester.

Textbooks

Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, Andrew Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, Prentice Hall.
Principles of Computer System Design. Jerome Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek, Morgan Kaufmann.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. W. Richard Stevens.

Atlassian’s Git tutorial A fairly comprehensive tutorial that doesn’t make your head hurt.

Tour of Go An interactive tool for exploring basic Go code. Good for getting a feel for the syntax.
Go Documentation Good for reference.
*Concurrency in Go Information on Channels and goroutines
*Go RPC Documentation Go’s Remote Procedure Call library documentation

*_{You will be returning to these frequently for assignments 2-4!}

Operating Systems: Principles and Practice, Thomas Anderson and Mike Dahlin, second edition recommended.
Modern Operating Systems, Andrew Tanenbaum, third edition recommended.

MapReduce Paper Google’s MapReduce system for distributed computation. This work inspired the creation of the open source version, Apache Spark (developed at Berkeley). Familiarity with this paper, particularly Section 3.3: Fault Tolerance, is necessary for assignment 1.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System A foundational distributed systems paper that discusses the difficulties of ordering events, and introduces the concepts of “Lamport Clocks” and “Vector Clocks”.
Linearizability Another foundational distributed systems paper written by Jeannette Wing, the Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia. Focuses on Linearizability, a strong consistency model for distributed data storage.
CAP Theorem A very easy-to-follow impossibility proof showing that no distributed system can all three of the properties: “Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance.”
Part-Time Parliament A bit of history: Leslie Lamport’s first paper on the Paxos protocol. Reads like a story more than a research paper. Virtually no one understood this paper, which led to author publishing:
Paxos Made Simple Which is what you will be implementing in assignment 3.