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2016-03-25
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Drew Verlee14:03:35

Does anyone have any recommendations on books/resources on distributed computing? As i understand it, their are usually two flavors of resources: (1) understanding distributed systems and (2) using distributed systems. Both are meaningful, any recommendations from either realm are welcome. simple_smile

gardnervickers14:03:48

Hmm I dont have any book recommendations but watching/reading everything Kyle Kingsbury has put out gave me a good introduction to the kind of problems distributed systems face

Drew Verlee14:03:31

@gardnervickers: good to hear, i’m currently trying to read everything he puts out there.

gardnervickers14:03:59

It’ll give you some good jumping off points

gardnervickers14:03:22

Everything that applies to distributed DB’s pretty much applies to distributed computing frameworks.

gardnervickers14:03:40

Just in new and interesting ways 😉

michaeldrogalis14:03:15

@drewverlee: I'd recommend finding a classic paper from the 70s or 80s, then working through the citations, repeat. YMMV.

ymilky16:03:18

@drewverlee: There's a lot of bad/misinformation out there, but I agree about classic papers. Avoid blogs and such in general unless it's something from what gardner mentioned above. I'd really read the Jepsen posts as there is a lot of good info about what not to do, which is useful for helping you sift through bs and spotting it later. That and it's really concrete info as opposed to pure theory no one has ever implemented. I'm not sure if you've already read it, but working with Clojure and building architecture, I still think a lot of what Tony Hoare has written about CSP is invaluable. He helps you understand understand both Go and Clojure core.async a bit better, not to mention he covers tons of use cases for applying CSP with accompanying proofs. I've even found some decent stuff that's helpful reading through everything from Plan9 as a lot of Plan9 itself was distributed.

lucasbradstreet16:03:12

I’d look through the archives

Drew Verlee16:03:36

thanks everyone!!! @lucasbradstreet, im reading through ‘the morning papers’ best of 2015 right now. that guy is brilliant. I start my day by trying to skim his post. @ymilky Im not sure i have read anything by Tony Hore, but i have read a lot about CSP. I have never heard of plan 9 ill add it to the list. @michaeldrogalis im curious why the 70’s and 80’s.

michaeldrogalis16:03:01

@drewverlee: Most of the fundamental, theoretical work for distributed systems happened back then. The rate of progress for the basics on which we build has understandably slowed down since.

ymilky16:03:04

Well plan9 is more general reading, but there's a lot of good insights. It was a rethink of big parts of unix by a lot of the original unix brains, including Rob Pike. You won't find as much as some other places necessarily, rather just practical uses of distributed computing and a lot of ideas for decoupling things and solving real-world problems. A lot of the work there was rolled into linux and bsd, so it's not just theory. For example networked union file systems came out of there.

Drew Verlee17:03:26

@manderson: awesome, bookmarked!