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Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a good distributed systems resource? It's one of the rare areas of CS I have a lot of trouble finding good tutorials and textbooks. Is it just something you pick up with pure practice?

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IMO if you develop a good understanding of Paxos then learn TLA+ you'll know everything you need to work on production distributed systems. Learn about CRDTs too, just to see what eventually-consistent systems look like. The real core of distributed systems is less knowing specific algorithms and more knowing what makes the field so hard, what solutions are possible, and the limitations of those solutions.

For learning Paxos I like this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsBg0AO6o

Implement it yourself in your language of choice.

For TLA+ there's the Practical TLA+ textbook or Leslie Lamport's video lecture series: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ is a good start.

Does the link have any content? I don't find anything.

Click the schedule on the left navbar for lecture links. Lab links are there too.

Thanks, didn't notice that at first.

It's pretty amazing how quick the industry has changed, and the course content has followed along with this. That's a lot of variety of content for 21 lectures. Would love to see a formalized online version of some of this stuff, for even an overview, high-level. Most of the stuff I find is pretty specific for a particular cloud-native environment.

I also noticed that the lectures are on YouTube[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQP8WApzIQQ&list=PLrw6a1wE39...

Check out https://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/comp520/schedule.html . That set of papers (most of which are not too hard to understand; and most of the interesting discussion is not so theoretical, but rather logical) is an excellent guide to thinking about distributed systems.

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