Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction is the first book to identify, examine, and illustrate the fundamental principles and abstractions in computer system design that are common across operating systems, networks, database systems, distributed systems, programming languages, software engineering, and computer architecture. Through carefully analyzed case studies from each of these disciplines, it demonstrates how to apply these principles and abstractions to tackle real system design problems. To support the focus on design, the book identifies and explains abstractions that have proven successful in practice such as, names, remote procedure call, client/service organization, file systems, transactions, replication with repair, read/write coherence, and authenticated and confidential messages. These abstractions allow designers to compose systems with increasingly strong modularity, to protect against failures ranging from accidental programmer errors to malicious adversaries. This book describes how these abstractions are implemented, demonstrates how they are used in different systems, and prepares the reader to apply them in future designs.

1. Systems2. Elements of Computer System Organization3. The Design of Naming Schemes4. Enforcing Modularity with Clients and Services5. Enforcing Modularity with Virtualization6. Performance7. The Network as a System and as a System Component8. Fault Tolerance: Reliable Systems from Unreliable Components9. Atomicity: All-or-Nothing and Before-or-After10. Information Security11. Suggestions for Further ReadingGlossaryProblem SetsIndex of Concepts