Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction

by Jerome H. Saltzer, M. Frans Kaashoek

This text identifies, examines, and illustrates fundamental concepts in computer system design that are common across operating systems, networks, database systems, distributed systems, programming languages, software engineering, security, fault tolerance, and architecture. Through carefully analyzed case studies from each of these disciplines, it demonstrates how to apply these concepts to tackle practical system design problems. To support the focus on design, the text identifies and explains abstractions that have proven successful in practice such as, remote procedure call, client/service organization, file systems, data integrity, consistency, and authenticated messages. Most computer systems are built using a handful of such abstractions. The text describes how these abstractions are implemented, demonstrates how they are used in different systems, and prepares the reader to apply them in future designs.This unique book is offered in an online / offline Chapters 1-6 are included in the book available from Morgan Kaufmann in print or ebook form. Chapters 7-11 are available online under a Creative Commons license. Download them for free at //www.elsevierdirect.com/companion.jsp?... Concepts of computer system design guided by fundamental principles.Cross-cutting approach that identifies abstractions common to networking, operating systems, transaction systems, distributed systems, architecture, and software engineering.Case studies that make the abstractions naming (DNS and the URL); file systems (the UNIX file system); clients and services (NFS); virtualization (virtual machines); scheduling (disk arms); security (TLS).Numerous pseudocode fragments that provide concrete examples of abstract concepts.Extensive support. The authors and MIT OpenCourseWarea provide on-line, free of charge, open educational resources, including additional chapters, course syllabi, board layouts and slides, lecture videos, and an archive of lecture schedules, class assignments, and design projects."

Genres: Computer Science, Textbooks, Software, Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Programming, Computers

561 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Fatima · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read some chapters as part of CS110 at Stanford.
I learned a lot but it is very dry and required me to read and re-read the chapter multiple times.

[hershey890 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Use Tanebaum and Bos' Modern Operating Systems or Arpaci-Dusseau's Operating Systems Three Easy Pieces instead.

This textbook is dry, full of pointless high-level fluff, verbose, and overly generic. Teaching operating systems from a generic, theoretical perspective is just a lot harder to learn from than something like Modern Operating Systems that actually includes pseudocode using the stl, pthreads, unix system calls, etc.

Not to mention Linus Torvalds studied Tanebaum's other textbook before creating Linux.

[Balmung · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to computer system: a great overview of all about a computer starting from file system and operating system to network. I think is a useful book for a first sight to computer system even though is to much generic in explaining some particular but in general this is not a problem for me.
Word of computer science engineering

[Zhen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read for computer system engineers, but too verbose.