About the book: The Internet is a distributed system, but so are wireless communication, cloud or parallel computing, multi-core systems, mobile networks. Also an ant colony, a brain, or even the human society can be modeled as distributed systems. In this book we will be highlighting common themes and techniques. In particular, we study some of the fundamental issues underlying the design of distributed systems, for example, communication, coordination, fault-tolerance, locality, parallelism, symmetry breaking, synchronization, and uncertainty.About the author: Roger Wattenhofer is a professor at ETH Zurich. Before joining ETH Zurich, he was at Brown University and Microsoft Research. His research interests include fault-tolerant distributed systems, efficient network algorithms, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. He has published more than 300 scientific articles. In 2017, he published the book Blockchain Science.