This book discusses distributed algorithms in the context of reliable application development. The algorithms are described intuitively and presented in pseudo-code as well. Even though this is an academic book, it is not too theoretical and is easy to follow. Theoretical complexity of the algorithms was for instance omitted on purpose.
The book presents the programming abstraction incrementally. It starts first with a recap of time abstractions and then builds a stack of algorithms in the following way: network and link abstractions, broadcast abstractions, shared memory abstractions, and consensus abstractions. The last chapter is about programming models used in real systems, for instance group communication or state machine replication.
If you are eager to learn how stuff work under the hood or want to have solid foundations to address reliable distributed programming, I recommend this book. I enjoyed reading it, but would have appreciated a bit more coverage of programming models in the last chapter.
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