Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction

About this book

Principles of Computer System Design is the first textbook to take a principles-based approach to the computer system design. It 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. The book is recommended for junior and senior undergraduate students in Operating Systems Distributed Systems Distributed Operating Systems and/or Computer Systems Design courses; and professional computer systems designers. 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 real: 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 OpenCourseWare 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