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ACM has made 'Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport' free to download
- ChuckMcM 7y agoWow, nice move. I suggest anyone who considers themselves to be serious about distributed systems or operating systems take advantage of this opportunity. Leslie was hugely impactful on my early career at Sun where I ended up being the "ONC/RPC architect." One of the people who whose work I admired was Andy Birrell (who many will agree "invented" of RPC). It felt that every time I reached out to Andy on a problem that seemed complex and untenable, he would point me at one of Leslie's papers.
- rumanator 7y agoOh, and he is the same Leslie Lamport who brought us LaTeX.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- patrec 7y agoNobody is perfect.
- threatofrain 7y agoAnd the one who created TLA+, a language for describing concurrent computations. http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html
- state_less 7y agoI like how he formalized future state into propositional logic so you could reason about a system across time.
- zerr 7y agoI'll wait for its "Made Simple" variant :)
- bandwitch 7y agoThe book is not hard to read. Each chapter is written independently and hence the chapters can also be read independently. Each chapter presents in an accessible manner some ideas taken from a couple of Lamport's seminal papers. In this sense, I believe reading Paxos from this book (chapter "Chapter 4 State Machine Replication with Benign Failures") would be much easier than reading Lamport's "Paxos Made Simple" paper. Actually, chapter 4 is a great read even if you know Paxos.
- CalChris 7y agoBruce Jay Nelson along with Andy Birrell.
- pmcjones 7y agoAndy => Andrew
- chapium 7y agoThis will fit in right next to Distributed Systems on my shelf.
- JadeNB 7y agoThis is awesome, and I appreciate the pointer to a specific book!—but isn't all of ACM's Digital Library free to download during until June 30? https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-during-covid-19 https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-...
- Jtsummers 7y agoI, for one, hadn't realized they'd made the books free to download (though I had intended to check that). I think most people assumed articles and journals when they read about the free DL access.
- eigen-vector 7y agoThat's awesome. I certainly missed this bulletin!
- copperx 7y agoThis is great. Do you know other similar resources that have been made available during this time?
- JadeNB 7y agoI don't, but keeping an eye out here is probably the best way to find out; I'm pretty sure that's how I saw the announcement above. Lots of publishers are making their textbooks temporarily available through resources like VitalSource and Redshelf, but (a) VitalSource at least is still reading DRMd material through a clumsy app (I haven't tried Redshelf); and (b) they seem more geared towards college textbooks than to scholarly works.
- ioncube 7y agoCambridge allowed everyone to access their library but then they changed it to "available online to students through their university library regardless of whether they were previously purchased" https://www.cambridge.org/about-us/covid-19/ https://www.cambridge.org/about-us/covid-19/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rubiquity 7y agoThis is a great book, and while you're at it you may as well check out the author/editor of the book's papers. Dahlia Malkhi has either written or advised authors of some very notable papers. Corfu, Tango[1], and FPaxos are just a few worth checking out. 0 - http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-final.pdf http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-final.p... 1 - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf 2 - https://fpaxos.github.io https://fpaxos.github.io
- fourier_mode 7y agoOn a similar note, does someone know of a resource which explains parallel abstractions/languages.
- chapium 7y agoGoetz explains several parallel abstractions above the OS mutexes. Java also has Atomics, Streams, ForkJoin, and ThreadPool resources in their concurrency library. Probably starting to age at this point, but its a lot nicer than using locks.
- kgoutham93 7y agoCan you share the respiratory
- enitihas 7y agoI think by Goetz the parent meant the book by Brian Goetz -> "Java Concurrency in Practice"
- lllmarclll 7y agongwibiuwrfb
- Upvoter33 7y agoWhile I appreciate all the "that's great!", these works should always be free. The fact that ACM, IEEE, and other professional organizations hide works behind firewalls is a crime against progress, and will eventually drive them out of business.
- smabie 7y agoWhile in theory I agree with you, in practice anyone who cares about academic papers or books either gets them from their university or knows how to get them for free. I don't think I've heard anyone ever complain about wanting to read an academic paper but being unable to do for free.
- cyphar 7y agoWell, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals (including ACM and IEEE, and even ISO) were not accessible through our university's library system. I usually just decided to not bother citing those papers and citing others. It just so happens that the field I was working in (astrophysics) is one where many papers are published on arXiv, but my supervisor always got frustrated when I used the arXiv copy of a paper (sometimes the final edit of a paper isn't uploaded to arXiv so you might be citing something which was removed after the journal review). And for papers not on arXiv, you can sometimes manage to the paper on the author's website but that's hardly a workable system (and those are usually preprints and not the final draft). And yes, you can get papers by emailing the author if you really need a copy but that limits your ability to search through many papers as broad background reading (it seems a waste of time for M researchers to ask N authors for a copy of a paper, only to read the abstract and results). Academic papers (which are publicly funded through grants and often produced by public institutions) should be free to the public. Those papers have already been paid for by the public. EDIT: ISO not being available was legitimately a real blow -- I was working on a personal project that required reading the DataMatrix standard and I couldn't get access to it. Instead I had to try to piece together the protocol from the Wikipedia description and just gave up because I couldn't get it working.
- gbpz 7y agoTook a graduate distributed systems course at UT Austin and it felt like a Leslie Lamport's greatest hits course. The best part was that all of his papers were actually really easy to understand and interpret... aside from Paxos which was easily explained by others.
- drallison 7y agoACM has done more than make Leslie's book available. The Digital Library is an amazing resource. You now have no excuse for wasting time while waiting for the pandemic to resolve. Kudos to the ACM. The notice published on the site: To help support our community working remotely during COVID-19, we are making all work published by ACM in our Digital Library freely accessible through June 30, 2020.
- senderista 7y agosci-hub is an even more amazing resource
- tasogare 7y agoYeah, it’s strange to butter ACM that have been total jerks until last week, and would not have done anything if not for the pandemia (and will resume their behavior afterwards). Sci-hub on the contrary have provided a free service for years, more reliable technically and content-wise than any library service at any research institution I worked. They are the real heroes.
- anonymousDan 7y agoWhile I would agree in the case of other commercial publishers, at the end of the day the ACM is a nonprofit owned by its members that invests back into the community. I don't think 100 dollars a year is excessive for what it provides.
- pridkett 7y agoThat $100 a year is a solid value to support the profession - especially if you take advantage of the Safari membership. Heck, just being able to point people, both executives and new hires, to the code of ethics has saved me several times. But, the digital library costs extra.
- anonymousDan 7y ago
- AceJohnny2 7y agoAt his age, every time I see a headline about Lamport, my first thought is "shit, has he died!?". Thankfully not.
- MikeTheGreat 7y agoHey, is anyone able to mirror the ACM archives? I mention this because, well, given the global pandemic now in effect, and given how closely intertwined the ACM is with their conferences, it seems like ACM might not be able to (financially) survive having all their conferences being canceled at once.
- v8engine 7y agoCan someone point me to greatest hits on the ACM?
- 8589934591 7y agoAre there any particular books apart from this that would be available on ACM that's good to download and read? Any suggestions?
- deepGem 7y agoAll books on ACM are free to download till June 30th. If databases is your thing you should certainly check out "Making Databases Work The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker", creator of Ingres, PostgreSQL and VoltDB and not to mention a Turning award winner.
- sriram_malhar 7y agoWhat a welcome contribution. If my lifetime is spent just properly internalising Lamport's work, I'd consider it a life well-lived.
- raju 7y agoAlong a similar vein, Springer just make "Linear Algebra Done Right" freely available as well — https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-11080-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-11080-6
- psychoslave 7y agoNice, how have you been made aware of this? Is there a list of freely available material at Springer?
- raju 7y agoI just happened on notice it on my timeline on Twitter. I did look around for a list from Springer, but I can't seem to find one.
- psychoslave 7y agoActually it seems that Springer has an open access program: https://www.springeropen.com/books https://www.springeropen.com/books There is currently around 1000 books available at https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&package=openaccess https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-type=%...
- closeparen 7y agoCan anyone who's read this comment on how useful it is for learning the concepts themselves vs. historical context and Lamport's biography?
- bandwitch 7y agoI have read most of the chapters in this book. I would say it's mostly about learning the concepts themselves and in this regard the book is extremely helpful. Additionally, each chapter has a historical context about Lamport's work and how it influenced future systems, research, etc. It's more like a related work section in a paper. But you could easily skip these parts if you're not interested in them.
- drcharris 7y agoThe epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the 'Download' button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the browser-armour I'm wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don't know. The PDF link works fine. Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub button on the main page, and add "?download=true" to the URL (mirroring the pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.