Textbook and Related Readings

Some of the content of the course is covered in my textbook, but many topics are new and not covered in the textbook, or in any other textbook on the market.

Accordingly, as much as possible, I'll put pointers to readings in the online syllabus, so that week by week you can learn more about the topics we cover in class. Sometimes that will be a research paper, sometimes a Wikipedia article, sometimes a ComputerWorld article, and sometimes a user manual published by a vendor, depending on the topic.

A book (not mine) I've recently encountered, that looks very good and really practical (lots of hands-on advice about setting up cloud computations and using cloud data analytics) is Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering, by Ian Foster and Dennis Gannon.I'm just starting to read this now and can't say yet whether it is strongly recommended, or very strongly recommended. But at a glance it looks sensational. The emphasis here is on understanding how to get data into a cloud, how to compute on it, and how to extract results. Our class will be a bit more focused on "how the cloud infrastructure itself works" but even so, these practical skills (the ones covered in this book) are highly germane and directly useful for people doing data-oriented projects. Product Details

We do not require that you purchase my textbook, or any other material -- you can find copies of my book in the Engineering library, and the other materials will be online. Here's a reference to my textbook.

Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems: Building High-Assurance Applications and Cloud-Hosted Services. 

 Click here to get to my spring 2014 version of CS5412 course, which has slide sets and other materials associated with an offering that was closely matched to the textbook.

Description: Description: Description: \\web2.cs.cornell.edu\cs\Courses\cs5412\2012sp\41o8u8MC8iL._SS500_.jpg