heathermiller / dist-prog-book, Hacker News

Source repo for the book that I and my students in my course at Northeastern University, CS Special Topics in Computing Systems: Programming Models for Distributed Computing

, are writing on the topic of programming models for distributed systems.

This is a book about the programming constructs we use to build distributed systems. These range from the small, RPC, futures, actors, to the large; systems built up of these components like MapReduce and Spark. We explore issues and concerns central to distributed systems like consistency, availability, and fault tolerance, from the lens of the programming models and frameworks that the programmer uses to build these systems.

Please note that this is a work in progress, the book contents are in this repo, but we have not yet polished everything and published the final book online. Expected release: end of December

Note: the chapters can be viewed by manually going to http: // dist-prog-book .com / chapter / x / article-name.html , eg, http: // dist-prog-book.com/chapter/2/futures.html. One we finish off the chapters that need the most work, we will "release" the book by putting a proper index page in place.

Note: we are currently in talks with a major publisher to publish this book as open-access textbook! Keep your fingers crossed! 🤞

Chapters


 RPC 

 Futures & Promises 
 Message-passing  Distributed Programming Languages  Languages Extended for Distribution
 CAP, Consistency, & CRDTs  Programming Languages & Consistency Large-scale Parallel Batch Processing  Large-scale Streaming  Editing this book    Workflow 
 Fork / clone 



 Edit on your local branch 
 
  Make a pull request to the  master  branch with your changes. Do not commit directly to the repository  


 After merge, visit the live site  http: //dist-prog-book.com/chapter/x/your-article.html

 
 Note: We have CI that builds the book for each commit. Pull requests that don't build will not be merged. 
 Note: when PRs are merged, the site is built and redeployed automatically. 
   Structure  

 Chapters are located in the  chapter folder of the root directory. 
   

 Dependencies 
 This site uses a Jekyll, a Ruby framework. You'll need Ruby and Bundler installed. 








 If you have Ruby already installed, to install Bundler, just do  sudo gem install bundler  
   Building & Viewing 

  Please build and view your site locally before submitting a PR!  
 cd into the directory where you cloned this repository, then install the required gems with  bundle install . This will automatically put the gems into  ./ vendor / bundle . 
 Start the server in the context of the bundle: 
 bundle exec jekyll serve  

 The generated site is available at  http: // localhost: 
 Note, this will bring you to the index page. If you'd like to see your chapter, make sure to navigate there explicitly, e.g.,  http: // localhost: / chapter / 1 / rpc.html  
   Adding / editing pages 
 Articles are in Markdown with straightforward YAML frontmatter. 
 You can include code, math (LaTeX syntax), figures, blockquotes, side notes, etc. You can also use regular BibTeX to make a bibliography. To see everything you can do, I've prepared an example article. 
  Live example article  

 Corresponding example page markdown If you would like to add BibTeX entries to the bibliography for your chapter, check the  _bibliography  directory for a . bib  file named after your chapter. 















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