mixu's book turned out to be a gem. He does a wonderful job of what he claims in the introduction:
I've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems. To me, that means two things: introducing the key concepts that you will need in order to have a good time reading more serious texts, and providing a narrative that covers things in enough detail that you get a gist of what's going on without getting stuck on details.
As a supplement to these I would also recommend checking out the lecture notes for 15-440, the intro distributed systems class. I took it spring of 2013 and thought it gave me a really good grounding in the material.
For a more ambitious reading list, refer to CS6410 from Cornell [0]. The topics of the readings range from operating systems to distributed systems and networking.
most papers in the above list are from the reading list to prepare my phd qual exam in university of Wisconsin: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/areas/os/Qual/ (it used to have 50 papers on the list; now, it's 40.)
Hey! We're working on some cool distributed systems stuff, data in particular - and dedicated to javascripters! If you're interested, check out http://github.com/amark/gun or send me a message!
This is a list of many of the most influential white papers: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07... This is an associated podcast: http://thinkdistributed.io/ This is mixu's book on distributed systems: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html This is the MIT reading list: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.852/05/papers/