(2026/2027) Distributed Systems

These notes are an unofficial resource and shouldn’t replace the course material or any other book on distributed systems. It is not made for commercial purposes. I’ve made the following notes to help me improve my knowledge and maybe it can be helpful for everyone.

As I have highlighted, a student should choose the teacher’s material or a book on the topic. These notes can only be a helpful material.

(expandable) The notes are taken from the books and other resources required for the course.

• Course slides.
• Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Maarten Van Steen, Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition) , Editore: Prentice Hall, Anno edizione: 2007
• George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Tim Kindberg, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (4th Edition), Editore: Addison Wesley, Anno edizione: 2005, ISBN: 0321263545

You can view/download the PDF here. In the notes folder, you can also see the source code.

In the CHANGELOG file you can see the changes made to each version of the PDF file. The versioning can be helpful if you want to understand if there are any new features/fixes in the file.

For any issue, use the appropriate section.

Course Syllabus

According to the official course syllabus:

Main lectures topics:

• Principles of concurrent programming for distributed systems
• Modelling distributed systems
• Basic communication facilities
• Naming
• Synchronization
• Fault tolerance
• Consistency and Replication
• Security
• Simulation