9 Best Books on Distributed Computing

“Distributed Computing South Asian Edition: Principles, Algorithms, and Systems” Book review: This textbook comprehensively addresses the theoretical foundations and practical applications of distributed computing. It covers a wide range of topics including fundamental principles, models, algorithms, and system aspects. The book strikes a balance between theory and practice, with special attention given to systems-related issues such as deadlock detection, mutual exclusion, authentication, and failure recovery. The algorithms presented in the book are carefully chosen and clearly explained without complex proofs. Simple explanations and illustrations are used throughout the book to facilitate understanding. Additionally, the book discusses emerging topics such as network security and peer-to-peer networks. It includes numerous examples, illustrations, and homework problems, making it an ideal resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying electrical and computer engineering, as well as computer science.

“Distributed and Cloud Computing: From Parallel Processing to the Internet of Things” Book review: This book primarily focuses on distributed computing and cloud computing, and it explores their connection to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is particularly beneficial for students studying cloud computing and IT or software engineers. The book is divided into three parts. The first part covers systems modeling, clustering, and virtualization. The second part delves into cloud computing and service-oriented architecture. Lastly, the third part explores GRIDS, P2P networks, and the future of the internet. It begins by discussing scalable computing and network-based systems. Additionally, the book provides explanations of popular public cloud platforms such as GAE, AWS, and Azure, as well as insights into grid architecture and service modeling.

“Distributed Computing: Principles and Applications” Book review: This book is specifically designed for students who have a basic understanding of Java programming. It explores various programming paradigms, protocols, and application program interfaces (APIs), such as RMI, COBRA, IDL, WWW, and SOAP. Each chapter introduces a specific paradigm or protocol and demonstrates its implementation through a practical example. The explanations are presented using a combination of descriptive text, code snippets, and diagrams to ensure clarity and conciseness. The book also includes exercises at the end of each chapter, which offer both analytical and hands-on practice to reinforce the concepts and API usage discussed throughout the book.

“Distributed Computing” Book review: This book delves into the fundamental concepts and techniques that underpin cloud computing. It offers a comprehensive exploration of distributed cloud computing, covering topics such as inter-process communication, synchronization, distributed system management, distributed shared memory, distributed file system, and naming. Moreover, it addresses emerging trends in high performance computing, including grid computing, SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), and cloud computing. Whether you are a student or a professional developer, this book will equip you with a solid understanding of distributed computing concepts and their practical applications.

“Distributed Computing with Python” Book review: This book offers guidance on developing Python programs for data processing that are dependable, accessible, and resilient. With this resource, you’ll gain knowledge on how to distribute computation tasks across several processors within a single machine, leading to better performance when processing large amounts of data. The book covers a variety of topics, such as synchronous and asynchronous models, shared memory and file systems, communication between processes, and synchronization. It commences with an overview of distributed computing in Python, parallelism, and asynchronous programming. Furthermore, it includes hands-on instruction on utilizing Python in the cloud and on an HPC cluster.

“Elements of Distributed Computing” Book review: This book explores the fundamental concepts of distributed computing systems, including time, state, simultaneity, order, knowledge, failure, and agreement. It focuses on the development of general mechanisms that can be applied to a wide range of problems. Various examples such as clocks, locks, cameras, sensors, controllers, slicers, and synchronizers are discussed in detail. These examples are carefully selected to be both fundamental and applicable in real-world scenarios. The book adopts an asynchronous model of distributed computing, focusing on systems without shared memory or bounded message delays in network computing.

“Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics” Book review: The book serves as an introductory guide to the mathematical foundations of distributed computing, presenting fundamental results in an accessible manner. It provides additional resources, including lecture notes and solutions for selected exercises. Each chapter concludes with bibliographical notes and a set of exercises for further practice. The book covers various topics, starting with basic algorithms in message-passing systems, leader election in rings, mutual exclusion in shared memory, fault-tolerant consensus, and causality and time in the fundamentals section. It then delves into broadcast and multicast, distributed shared memory, fault-tolerant simulations of read/write objects, and simulating synchrony in the simulation section. Lastly, the book explores advanced topics in distributed computing.

“Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms (Wiley Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing)” Book review: The target audience for this book includes professional computer science developers and graduate students, particularly at the Masters level. Its goal is to identify research directions and technologies that can facilitate the creation of a global marketplace for cloud computing services. The book serves as a valuable reference for a wide range of readers, including systems architects, practitioners, developers, new researchers, and graduate-level students. As a relatively recent area of research, there is currently no existing reference book that comprehensively addresses this topic. This book fills that gap and makes a timely contribution to a field that is gaining significant research interest and momentum, while also being of increasing relevance to commercial developers.

“eScience on Distributed Computing Infrastructure: Achievements of PLGrid Plus Domain-Specific Services and Tools (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)” Book Review: This book provides an in-depth exploration of the Polish Grid (PL Grid) Infrastructure, covering a diverse range of topics such as Acoustics, AstroGrid-PL, Bioinformatics, Ecology, Energy sector, Health Sciences, HEP Grid, Life Sciences, Materials, Metallurgy, Nanotech, Quantum Chemistry, Molecular Physics, and SynchroGrid. The first eight chapters offer a general overview of the research, while chapters nine to thirteen discuss new environments. Chapters fourteen to thirty-six delve into the application of these PL Grid environments in computer simulations. This book caters to researchers, developers, and system administrators seeking a comprehensive understanding of PL Grid Infrastructure.