From the Foreword to the book, by Ken Birman, Cornell University. "This new, much-revised and expanded edition is an impressive testimony to the state of the art today." This second edition of the bestselling text on open distributed systems is comprehensively updated and expanded to reflect recent advances in the field. The approach is based on a uniform view of resources in distributed systems using client-server and group communication models. Design approaches emphasise openness, scalability, transparency, reliability and security. The book begins with the foundations for open distributed systems including networking, interprocess communication, remote procedure calling, name services, distributed time management and file services. It introduces new technologies including ATM networking, internetworks, multicast protocols, microkernel-based distributed operating systems and distributed shared memory. It also covers the design of services supporting the sharing of distributed data, including replication, concurrency control, recovery, fault tolerance and security. The material is supported by definitions of service interfaces and algorithms and by copious case studies. The case studies provide an excellent insight into the current state-of-the-art in distributed system design. They include: