Prerequisites
This class is appropriate for graduate students and advanced
undergraduates, especially those interested in systems. Some
familiarity with system/network programming will be helpful;
undergraduates should have taken 318 and/or 461.
Textbooks
This year, there is an official textbook for the course which we will have weekly reading from:
- Principles of Computer System Design
- The first half of the book is a traditional printed text from
Elsevier (ISBN: 978-0-12-374957-4). It is available from both Labyrinth Books (in Princeton) and Amazon for around $56.
- The second half of the book can be found online for free from MIT's Open Course Ware.
Additionally, the following texts may be of interest:
- Modern Operating Systems, 2/E by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Publisher's website. ISBN: 978-0-130-31358-4.
- Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition) by
Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten Van Steen.
Publisher's website. ISBN-13: 978-0-13-239227-3.
- Reliable Distributed Systems: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications by Kenneth P. Birman.
Publisher's website. ISBN: 978-0-387-21509-9.
For reference, all three of these texts have been placed on reserve at the library for this class.