Scientific editing of the Greek edition: Spyros Kontoyiannis, University of Patras.

The fourth edition of the book Distributed Systems continues to thoroughly explore the fundamental principles, advanced concepts, and technologies of distributed systems. The main topics covered in each chapter include architectures, processes, communication, coordination, naming, consistency and replication, fault tolerance, and security.

Among other topics, interesting subjects such as middleware, cloud computing, virtualization, naming data networking, replica management, caching and copying on the Web, distributed consensus, and authentication and authorization are analyzed. Along with the fundamental principles, existing distributed systems are also presented as examples, such as blockchain systems, which are frequently referenced in the book.

Key features of the fourth edition: The material has been thoroughly reviewed, revised, and updated. The code examples have been updated to Python 3, and every effort has been made to ensure their execution is simple and straightforward. Throughout the chapters, there are special boxes (Notes) covering more advanced topics. At the end of the book, a comprehensive bibliography and a brief glossary are provided.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Communication
• Processes
• Naming
• Synchronization
• Consistency and Replication
• Fault Tolerance
• Security
• Object-based Distributed Systems
• Distributed File Systems
• Document-based Distributed Systems
• Coordination-based Distributed Systems
• Suggested Readings and Bibliography