6.033 Reading List

Textbook

• Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. The Mythical Man-Month. Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN: 0-201-83595-9. (The 1974 edition is also usable in 6.033.) (This book is primarily used at the end of the term.)

Class notes

• Jerome H. Saltzer and M. Frans Kaashoek. Topics in the Engineering of Computer Systems (working title).

  The class notes are gradually being written. The contain chapters in draft form, some of which are more mature than others. Updates to the chapters are likely to show up during the term. (The class notes will be handed out as a separate package.)

  • Chapter 1 The study of systems
  • Chapter 2 Enforcing modularity
  • Chapter 3 Designing system modules
  • Chapter 4 Networks
  • Chapter 5 Naming
  • Chapter 6 Protection of information
  • Chapter 7 Reliability
  • Chapter 8 Atomicity
  • Chapter 9 Suggestions for further reading
  • Problems & Solutions

Papers

Introduction to computer systems

1. Richard P. Gabriel. The rise of "Worse is better". On-line version of "Worse is Better", From LISP: good news, bad news, how to win BIG, AI Expert 6, 6 (June, 1991) pages 33-35.
2. Herbert A. Simon. The architecture of complexity. Proceedings American Philosophical Society 106, 6 (December, 1962) pages 467-482. Republished as Part 4, pages 84-118, of The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, 1969. ISBN: 0-262-191051-6 (hardbound) 0-262-69023-3 (paperback).
3. George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan. The science of scientific writing. American Scientist 78, 6 (November-December, 1990) pages 550-558.
4. Nancy G. Leveson and Clark S. Turner. An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents. Computer 26, 7 (July, 1993) pages 18-41.

Computer system organization

5. Robert Scheifler and Jim Gettys. The X window system. ACM Transactions on Graphics 5, 2 (April, 1986) pages 79-109.
6. Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken L.Thompson. The UNIX time-sharing system. Bell System Technical Journal 57, 6, part 2 (1978) pages 1905-1930.
7. Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Flash: An efficient and portable Web server. Proc. of 1999 Annual Usenix Technical Conference, Monterey, CA (June, 1999), pp 199-212.

Networking

8. Robert M. Metcalfe and David R. Boggs. Ethernet: Distributed packet switching for local computer networks. Communications of the ACM 19, 7 (July, 1976) pages 395-404.
9. Hari Balakrishnan. Wide-area Unicast Internet Routing. Lecture notes 6.829 (Fall 2001), Lecture 6, MIT (Sept. 2001).
10. Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David. D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, 4 (November, 1984) pages 277-288.
11. Russell Sandberg, David Goldberg, Steve Kleiman, Dan Walsh, and Bob Lyon. Design and implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem. Proc. of the 1985 Summer Usenix Technical Conference, El Cerrito, CA (June 1985), pp. 119-130.

Naming

12. Sergy Brin and Lawrence Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Proc. of the 7th WWW Conference, Brisbane, Australia (April 1998). Published in: COMPUTER NETWORKS, (formerly Computer Networks and ISDN Systems), Vol 30, 1998, pp 107-117.

Security

13. Steven R. Lerman, James D. Bruce, and Jerome H. Saltzer. Teaching students about responsible use of computers. Communications of the ACM 32, 6 (June, 1989) page 704. The publication omits the names of the first two authors.
14. Ken Thompson. Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984) pages 761-763.
15. Ross J. Anderson. Why cryptosystems fail. Proceedings of the 1993 ACM Conference in Computer and Communications Security, (1993) pages 32-40.

Failure recovery, coordination, and atomicity

16. Mendel Rosenblum and John K. Ousterhout. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Pacific Grove, California (October 13-16, 1991) pages 1-15. Published as Operating Systems Review 25, 5 (1991). Also appeared in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 10, 1 (February, 1992) pages 26-52.
17. Henry Petroski. Engineering: History and failure. American Scientist 80, 6 (November-December, 1992) pages 523-526.
18. Phillip J. Plauger. Chocolate. Embedded Systems Programming 7, 3 (March, 1994) pages 81-84.
19. Jim Gray, Paul McJones, Bruce Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, Tom Price, Franco Putzolu, and Irving Traiger. The recovery manager of the System R database manager. ACM Computing Surveys 13, 2 (June, 1981) pages 223-242.
20. James J. Kistler and Mahadev Satyanarayanan. Disconnected operation in the Coda file system. Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, California. In Operating Systems Review 25, 5 (December, 1991) pages 213-225.

More complexity

21. Butler W. Lampson. Hints for computer system design. Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (October 10-13, 1983), pages 33-48. Published as Operating Systems Review 17, 5 (1983).