Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software

Preface

Who this Book is For

This book is for both the novice at fault tolerant programming as well as the experienced practitioner. Both will find it useful to explain the key tradeoffs involved in a number of fault tolerant programming and system design techniques.

Most other books on the subject of reliable or fault tolerant software are concerned with aspects of Software Quality or Software Reliability Engineering. Those works are about fault prevention or the modeling and analysis of systems to predict reliability. This book's goal is to provide proven techniques, in the form of patterns, that can make programs less failure prone when executing.

With this book you will be able to understand key fault tolerance techniques and how to include them into your designs.

How to Use this Book

This book can be used in several ways. Beginners can read Chapters 1 and 2 to get an understanding of the principles and key processes involved in designing fault tolerant systems and then skim the remainder of the book

Fault tolerance practitioners can use this book as a reference, referring to the patterns in Chapters 4 through 8 for refreshers on the key principles involved as they are confronting familiar problems. To gain an overview you can just read the chapter introductions and skim the patterns. Skimming Chapters 1 through 3 would be useful to grasp the way some of the key words are used in this book. Turning to the Appendices first will provide a quick reference to the patterns with their intents ...