Foundations of Scalable Systems

Part I. The Basics

The first four chapters in Part I of this book advocate the need for scalability as a key architectural attribute in modern software systems. These chapters provide broad coverage of the basic mechanisms for achieving scalability, the fundamental characteristics of distributed systems, and an introduction to concurrent programming. This knowledge lays the foundation for what follows, and if you are new to the areas of distributed, concurrent systems, you’ll need to spend some time on these chapters. They will make the rest of the book much easier to digest.