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Reviewer: Shrisha Rao

This is the second edition of a well-received graduate course textbook dealing with the important field of distributed computing. This edition has been brought out by a different publisher than the first [1], and the authors have brought the material as up to date as possible, including some important results published since the first edition appeared. As the title suggests, the book is divided into three major parts, dealing with fundamentals, simulations, and advanced topics. A course on distributed computing can be variably designed, depending on the instructor's priorities, using most of the first part and selected portions from the next two parts. A graph indicating chapter dependencies is provided by the authors in the preface. The first part of the book covers the very basic ideas of the field, such as message passing, mutual exclusion, shared memory, consensus, and logical time. In my opinion, the second part is what makes the book most worthwhile. It deals with abstractions for describing and designing systems to solve, or simulate, real problems such as broadcast and multicast. The discussion on read/write registers and the like is crucial to the field and has attracted extensive interest. The last part of the book deals with some advanced questions that an interested student may refer to before plunging into the current research literature. Two chapters (old numbers 16 and 18) from the first edition have been deleted from this section, while a new chapter on failure detectors has been added (new number 17). The student exercises and "Chapter Notes" given at the end of each chapter are useful instructional resources (though some instructors might complain that there should be more or different exercises), one of the authors (Attiya) maintains a Web site with supplementary instructor resources, including exercise solutions and lecture notes for a sample course. Numerous typographical and other errors from the first edition have been corrected. Online Computing Reviews Service