[nhaliday]

Yeah, until now I found it discouraging that most freely available material in distributed systems consisted of either reading lists or terse slides. I've seen people compare to the field to the humanities in that reading the primary sources is the main way people learn, but I've never found that easy going.

edit:

And it looks like a similar question has been asked at http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/4793/start-learning-ab..., with some other recommendations I wasn't aware of.

[davidw]

It's a bit like learning to work on a bicycle by reading physics textbooks.

[SkyMarshal]

I have no problem reading the primary sources but where does one who is not in academia without expensive journal access obtain them all? I've tried digging around for pdf's but it seems they're scattered all over the place or locked behind paywalls.