Few would doubt that distributed computing is an important field of study, and that it is likely to become more important over time. As the paradigm for large-scale computation ceases to be the monolithic and very expensive supercomputer and shifts towards smaller, off-the-shelf units rigged up to deliver a combined bigger punch, and as people increasingly seek to collaborate across large geographical distances, the problems and practice of distributed computing are of obvious significance.

One of the persistent problems in the field is the relative lack of tutorial material, which often means that students and newcomers alike are obliged to delve into a diverse collection of research papers in the hope of forming a coherent perspective. The fact that the theory of distributed computing is not as well understood by computer scientists working in other areas, and is even less familiar to practitioners in the field of information technology, often makes it difficult for researchers working in distributed computing to communicate the importance and usefulness of their work. It also means that a researcher presenting a paper on distributed computing to an audience of non-specialists is obliged to spend a good chunk of his or her allotted time in first explaining the rudiments of the subject before moving on to specialized issues. Part of the problem has been the lack of attention paid to distributed computing in traditional undergraduate computer science curricula (the topic continues to remain largely outside the realm of core subjects, even in graduate studies), but this, in turn, is also attributable to the lack of tutorial material.

This book is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on distributed computing; it lays out important theoretical results in the field in a form that can be used by a student (or a newcomer) for self-education.

As the title suggests, the author has tried to create a textbook that can be used for instructing beginning graduate students in the basic concepts of distributed computing, or used by others who wish to learn these concepts for their own sake. This is not a research monograph in the main, and it departs to a significant extent from texts devoted to presenting and summarizing research.

The text is divided into 30 relatively brief chapters, each covering an important topic in distributed computing. The author suggests that two chapters be covered in the course of a week’s instruction, so that the text as a whole may be covered in the course of a 15-week semester. The author’s scheme is attractive, and he is to be complimented for his effort in presenting such a scheme for instructors who otherwise have few guideposts to aid in developing a comprehensive, sensible strategy of coverage. I wonder, however, if covering all 30 chapters in the course of a semester (especially with beginning graduate students) requires a pace that is too brisk for comfort.

The book addresses the asynchronous model of distributed computation, which is good in the sense that all result s presented will hold in the synchronous case as well (though the opposite would not be true). The book also considers only the message-passing paradigm of communication, not shared-memory. A large body of current work in distributed computing uses the synchronous model and the shared-memory paradigm, both of which are actually easier to understand than the message-passing paradigm. This ease of use might have been appreciated by beginning students. Some exposure to shared memory analyses might also have helped students understand the connections between distributed computing and parallel processing, another important topic.