| To the best of our knowledge this textbook is unique in its scope and approach. It provides a broad and in-depth introduction to the main principles and abstractions for engineering computer systems, be it an operating system, a client/service application, a database system, a secure Web site, or a fault-tolerant disk cluster. These principles and abstractions are timeless and are of value to any student or professional reader, whether or not specializing in computer systems. The principles and abstractions derive from insights that have proven to work over generations of computer systems, the authors’ own experience with building computer systems, and teaching about them for several decades.
The book teaches a broad set of principles and abstractions, yet it explores them in depth. It captures the core of a concept using pseudocode so that readers can test their understanding of a concrete instance of the concept. Using pseudocode, the book carefully documents the essence of client/service computing, remote procedure calls, files, threads, address spaces, best-effort networks, atomicity, authenticated messages, and so on. This approach continues in the problem sets, where readers can explore the design of a wide range of systems by studying their pseudocode. |
