Mikito Takada (AKA mixu) has a free book called Distributed systems: for fun and profit that you can read online or download: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/ htt

Mikito Takada (AKA mixu) has a free book called Distributed systems: for fun and profit that you can read online or download: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/ http://book.mixu.net/distsys/ From the introduction: In this text I've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems. To me, that means two things: introducing the key concepts that you will need in order to have a good time reading more serious texts, and providing a narrative that covers things in enough detail that you get a gist of what's going on without getting stuck on details. Also, it covers some relatively recent tools/techniques that are used in the real-world: I wanted a text that would bring together the ideas behind many of the more recent distributed systems - systems such as Amazon's Dynamo, Google's BigTable and MapReduce, Apache's Hadoop and so on.