It's not that there is a lack of information out there. You can find academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books on the subject. The problem is that the available information is spread out all over the place, and if you were to put it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find a lot of material at the two ends, but not much in the middle.That is why I decided to write a book to teach the fundamentals of distributed systems so that you don’t have to spend countless hours scratching your head to understand how everything fits together. This is the guide I wished existed when I first started out, and it's based on my experience building large distributed systems that scale to millions of requests per second and billions of devices.If you develop the back-end of web or mobile applications (or would like to!), this book is for you. When building distributed systems, you need to be familiar with the network stack, data consistency models, scalability and reliability patterns, and much more. Although you can build applications without knowing any of that, you will end up spending hours debugging and re-designing their architecture, learning lessons that you could have acquired in a much faster and less painful way.

     -Byte, September 1995 I can't begin to tell you how many pleasurable hours of study and recreation they have afforded me! I have pored over them in cars, restaurants, at work, at home... and even at a Little League game when my son wasn't in the line-up. -Charles Long If you think you're a really good programmer... read [Knuth's] Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing. -Bill Gates It's always a pleasure when a problem is hard enough that you have to get the Knuths off the shelf. I find that merely opening one has a very useful terrorizing effect on computers. -Jonathan Laventhol This first volume in the series begins with basic programming concepts and techniques, then focuses more particularly on information structures-the representation of information inside a computer, the structural relationships between data elements and how to deal with them efficiently. Elementary applications are given to simulation, numerical methods, symbolic computing, software and system design. Dozens of simple and important algorithms and techniques have been added to those of the previous edition. The section on mathematical preliminaries has been extensively revised to match present trends in research. Ebook (PDF version) produced by Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP), http: //msp.org