Principles of Computer Systems (course notes)

This is a course for computer system designers and builders, and for people who want to really understand how systems work, especially concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems.

The course teaches you
.    how to write precise specifications for any kind of computer system,
.    what it means for an implementation to satisfy a specification, and
.    how to prove that it does.
It also shows you how to use the same methods less formally, and gives you some suggestions for deciding how much formality is appropriate (less formality means less work, and often a more understandable spec, but also more chance to overlook an important detail).

The course also teaches you a lot about the topics in computer systems that we think are the most important: persistent storage, concurrency, naming, networks, distributed systems, transactions, fault tolerance, and caching. The emphasis is on
.    careful specifications of subtle and sometimes complicated things,
.    the important ideas behind good implementations, and
.    how to understand what makes them actually work.

We spend most of our time on specific topics, but we use the general techniques throughout. We emphasize the ideas that different kinds of computer system have in common, even when they have different names.