
ACM has made 'Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport' free to download - eigen-vector
https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3335772
======
ChuckMcM
Wow, nice move. I suggest anyone who considers themselves to be serious about
distributed systems or operating systems take advantage of this opportunity.
Leslie was hugely impactful on my early career at Sun where I ended up being
the "ONC/RPC architect." One of the people who whose work I admired was Andy
Birrell (who many will agree "invented" of RPC). It felt that every time I
reached out to Andy on a problem that seemed complex and untenable, he would
point me at one of Leslie's papers.

~~~
rumanator
Oh, and he is the same Leslie Lamport who brought us LaTeX.

~~~
threatofrain
And the one who created TLA+, a language for describing concurrent
computations.

[http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html](http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html)

~~~
state_less
I like how he formalized future state into propositional logic so you could
reason about a system across time.

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drallison
ACM has done more than make Leslie's book available. The Digital Library is an
amazing resource. You now have no excuse for wasting time while waiting for
the pandemic to resolve. Kudos to the ACM.

The notice published on the site: _To help support our community working
remotely during COVID-19, we are making all work published by ACM in our
Digital Library freely accessible through June 30, 2020._

~~~
senderista
sci-hub is an even more amazing resource

~~~
tasogare
Yeah, it’s strange to butter ACM that have been total jerks until last week,
and would not have done anything if not for the pandemia (and will resume
their behavior afterwards). Sci-hub on the contrary have provided a free
service for years, more reliable technically and content-wise than any library
service at any research institution I worked. They are the real heroes.

~~~
anonymousDan
While I would agree in the case of other commercial publishers, at the end of
the day the ACM is a nonprofit owned by its members that invests back into the
community. I don't think 100 dollars a year is excessive for what it provides.

~~~
pridkett
That $100 a year is a solid value to support the profession - especially if
you take advantage of the Safari membership. Heck, just being able to point
people, both executives and new hires, to the code of ethics has saved me
several times.

But, the digital library costs extra.

~~~
anonymousDan
My bad, 200 all in.

Your point about the code of ethics is intriguing! Do you point them to the
code of ethics before or after the fact? Or to push back against someone
trying to get you to do something unethical?

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Upvoter33
While I appreciate all the "that's great!", these works should always be free.
The fact that ACM, IEEE, and other professional organizations hide works
behind firewalls is a crime against progress, and will eventually drive them
out of business.

~~~
smabie
While in theory I agree with you, in practice anyone who cares about academic
papers or books either gets them from their university or knows how to get
them for free. I don't think I've heard anyone ever complain about wanting to
read an academic paper but being unable to do for free.

~~~
cyphar
Well, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but
while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals
(including ACM and IEEE, and even ISO) were not accessible through our
university's library system. I usually just decided to not bother citing those
papers and citing others.

It just so happens that the field I was working in (astrophysics) is one where
many papers are published on arXiv, but my supervisor always got frustrated
when I used the arXiv copy of a paper (sometimes the final edit of a paper
isn't uploaded to arXiv so you might be citing something which was removed
after the journal review). And for papers not on arXiv, you can sometimes
manage to the paper on the author's website but that's hardly a workable
system (and those are usually preprints and not the final draft). And yes, you
can get papers by emailing the author if you really need a copy but that
limits your ability to search through many papers as broad background reading
(it seems a waste of time for M researchers to ask N authors for a copy of a
paper, only to read the abstract and results).

Academic papers (which are publicly funded through grants and often produced
by public institutions) should be free to the public. Those papers have
already been paid for by the public.

EDIT: ISO not being available was legitimately a real blow -- I was working on
a personal project that required reading the DataMatrix standard and I
couldn't get access to it. Instead I had to try to piece together the protocol
from the Wikipedia description and just gave up because I couldn't get it
working.

~~~
smabie
Okay, so just pirate them?

~~~
cyphar
Less well-known papers are difficult to pirate, but even if that wasn't true I
also think that it's quite strange to argue that researchers should pirate
papers rather than making the papers free to the public.

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JadeNB
This is awesome, and I appreciate the pointer to a specific book!—but isn't
_all_ of ACM's Digital Library free to download during until June 30?

[https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-
access-...](https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-
during-covid-19)

~~~
copperx
This is great. Do you know other similar resources that have been made
available during this time?

~~~
JadeNB
I don't, but keeping an eye out here is probably the best way to find out; I'm
pretty sure that's how I saw the announcement above.

Lots of publishers are making their textbooks temporarily available through
resources like VitalSource and Redshelf, but (a) VitalSource at least is still
reading DRMd material through a clumsy app (I haven't tried Redshelf); and (b)
they seem more geared towards college textbooks than to scholarly works.

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rubiquity
This is a great book, and while you're at it you may as well check out the
author/editor of the book's papers. Dahlia Malkhi has either written or
advised authors of some very notable papers. Corfu, Tango[1], and FPaxos are
just a few worth checking out.

0 - [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-
final.p...](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/corfumain-final.pdf)

1 -
[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~taozou/sosp13/tangososp.pdf)

2 - [https://fpaxos.github.io](https://fpaxos.github.io)

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raju
Along a similar vein, Springer just make "Linear Algebra Done Right" freely
available as well —
[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-11080-6](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-11080-6)

~~~
psychoslave
Nice, how have you been made aware of this? Is there a list of freely
available material at Springer?

~~~
raju
I just happened on notice it on my timeline on Twitter. I did look around for
a list from Springer, but I can't seem to find one.

~~~
psychoslave
Actually it seems that Springer has an open access program:
[https://www.springeropen.com/books](https://www.springeropen.com/books)

There is currently around 1000 books available at
[https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-
type=%...](https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-
type=%22Book%22&package=openaccess)

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gbpz
Took a graduate distributed systems course at UT Austin and it felt like a
Leslie Lamport's greatest hits course. The best part was that all of his
papers were actually really easy to understand and interpret... aside from
Paxos which was easily explained by others.

~~~
bjcy
I hope it was with Dr. Alvisi and various arias to open every lecture!

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8589934591
Are there any particular books apart from this that would be available on ACM
that's good to download and read? Any suggestions?

~~~
deepGem
All books on ACM are free to download till June 30th. If databases is your
thing you should certainly check out "Making Databases Work The Pragmatic
Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker", creator of Ingres, PostgreSQL and VoltDB and
not to mention a Turning award winner.

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drcharris
The epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the
'Download' button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the
browser-armour I'm wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don't know. The PDF link
works fine.

Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub
button on the main page, and add "?download=true" to the URL (mirroring the
pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.

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MikeTheGreat
Hey, is anyone able to mirror the ACM archives?

I mention this because, well, given the global pandemic now in effect, and
given how closely intertwined the ACM is with their conferences, it seems like
ACM might not be able to (financially) survive having all their conferences
being canceled at once.

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fourier_mode
On a similar note, does someone know of a resource which explains parallel
abstractions/languages.

~~~
chapium
Goetz explains several parallel abstractions above the OS mutexes. Java also
has Atomics, Streams, ForkJoin, and ThreadPool resources in their concurrency
library. Probably starting to age at this point, but its a lot nicer than
using locks.

~~~
kgoutham93
Can you share the respiratory

~~~
enitihas
I think by Goetz the parent meant the book by Brian Goetz -> "Java Concurrency
in Practice"

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v8engine
Can someone point me to greatest hits on the ACM?

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closeparen
Can anyone who's read this comment on how useful it is for learning the
concepts themselves vs. historical context and Lamport's biography?

~~~
bandwitch
I have read most of the chapters in this book. I would say it's mostly about
learning the concepts themselves and in this regard the book is extremely
helpful. Additionally, each chapter has a historical context about Lamport's
work and how it influenced future systems, research, etc. It's more like a
related work section in a paper. But you could easily skip these parts if
you're not interested in them.

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sriram_malhar
What a welcome contribution. If my lifetime is spent just properly
internalising Lamport's work, I'd consider it a life well-lived.

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AceJohnny2
At his age, every time I see a headline about Lamport, my first thought is
"shit, has he died!?".

Thankfully not.

