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Literature

General

Coulouris, George and others

Distributed Systems -- Concepts and Design, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Excellent survey on the main issues in distributed computing; if you intend to buy just one book on this topic, I recommend this one.

Mullender, Sape (ed.)

Distributed Systems, Addison-Wesley and ACM Press, 1993.

A collection of 21 chapters by various authors (and of varying quality) on all topics of distributed system design; more in depth than Coulouris book with extensive citations, probably you are interested only in some of the material, but already this makes the book worthwile.

Birman, Kenneth P.

Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications, Manning, 1996.

Of the 26 chapters, 19 describe general distributed computing issues as they can be also found in other books. However, Chapters 12-18 give a comprehensive presentation the theory and practice of the design of reliable distributed software, especially on the basis of group communication (the author is the developer of the ISIS toolkit).

Jalote, Pankaj

Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems, Prentice Hall, 1994.

In-depth discussion of all issues (from problems and algorithms to software design) of fault tolerance; recommended as supplementary material.

Distributed Operating Systems

Tanenbaum, Andrew S.

Distributed Operating Systems, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Reference book on distributed computing from the operating system point of view. Its strength is the description of distributed file systems and distributed shared memory, extensive case studys of various distributed operating systems.

Sinha, Pradeep K.

Distributed Operating Systems -- Concepts and Design, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

Competes with Tanenbaum's book, similar topics and structure. The case studies are less extensive, the general part is more detailed.

Chow, Randy and Johnson, Theodore

Distributed Operating Systems and Algorithms, Addison Wesley, 1997.

Part I covers the same area as Tanenbaum's book (from a bit more theoretical point of view); Part II contains a subset of Lynch's material (from a bit more practical point of view). This makes it a recommendable link between theory and practice.

Distributed Algorithms

Lynch, Nancy A.

Distributed Algorithms, Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.

The reference book on distributed algorithms.

Attiya, Hagit and Welch, Jennifer

Distributed Computing -- Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics, McGrawHill, 1998.

Part I presents fundamental distributed algorithms; Part II gives a series of simulations between models of distributed computing, implementing more powerful ones on top of less powerful ones; Part III presents advanced algorithm topics. It is Part II that makes this book really interesting.

Distributed Programming

Siegel, John

CORBA Fundamentals and Programming, John Wiley & Sons, 1996.

The CORBA reference by one of the main contributors.

Mowbray, Thomas J. and Malveau, Raphael C.

CORBA Design Patterns, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

List of distributed design patterns, too superficial for my taste.

Schmidt, Douglas

Patterns for Concurrent, Parallel, and Distributed Systems, http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/research.html, 1999.

If you are interested in patterns, a much better source of information (many reports and publications) than Mowbray's book.

Orfali, Robert and Harkey, Dan

Client/Server Programming with Java and Corba, John Wiley & Sons 1997.

Practically oriented, wittily written, a bit superficial; examples in Java RMI and CORBA; comparisons to other technologies.

Farley, Jim

Java Distributed Computing, O'Reilly, 1998.

Networking, threads, security, message-passing, RMI, databases in Java; example of building a collaborative application.

Harold, Elliotte Rusty

Java Network Programming, O'Reilly 1997.

Socket programming in Java, outlook on RMI.

Lea, Doug

Concurrent Programming in Java, Addison-Wesley 1997.

Good introduction into concurrent programming, a bit unfortunate that the presentation is so closely bound to Java.