Things you need
— or might need
You should make sure that you have an account on the Rutgers Sun systems running Solaris (e.g. romulus). Getting an account on the cereal machines may also be helpful. You may be able to use other machines (e.g. IRIX, PCs running Linux, some flavor of BSD, Mac OS X, or — for some assignments — even a Windows PC running cygwin) but I will not accept the excuse of not having an account in time to finish an assignment. If you develop your assignment on another system, you should ensure that it compiles and runs on a Linux or Solaris system.
You will need to check the Paul at Rutgers web page regularly since I will be posting notices, assignment source/data, changes to the syllabus, and exam results there.
There is no textbook for this course. The closest to a primary text is:
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms
Andrew S. Tannenbaum, Maarten van Steen
2nd edition, Prentice Hall, October 2006
You need not buy this, but if you feel more comfortable having a supplemantary text, go ahead. It's now $96.05 from Amazon and a whopping $113.00 from Barnes & Noble, and $98.95 from bookpool.com. (I hope the Rutgers bookstore is cheaper). There's also a paperback edition.
I will also be making some limited use of the following texts:
Distributed Operating systems
Andy Tannenbaum
Prentice Hall, 1995
Distributed systems concepts and design
George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg
Second Edition
Addison Wesley, 1994
Although it is considerably cheaper than the Tanenbaum text, I do not recommend it since I do not find it to be clearly written or very comprehensive.
I will also be using (much less extensively):
Distributed Systems, 2nd edition
Sape Mullender, ed.
ACM Press, 1993
This text is a collection of a number of classic papers on the topic.
If you studied Operating Systems at Rutgers (416) several years ago, you may have used:
Modern Operating Systems: (2nd edition)
by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
©2001 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
ISBN 0130313580
This is a fine reference for refreshing your memory.
