ACM has made 'Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport' free to download

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.

ACM has done more than make Leslie&#x27;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.<p>The notice published on the site: <i>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.</i>

While I appreciate all the &quot;that&#x27;s great!&quot;, 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.

This is awesome, and I appreciate the pointer to a specific book!—but isn&#x27;t <i>all</i> of ACM&#x27;s Digital Library free to download during until June 30?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acm.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bulletins&#x2F;2020&#x2F;march&#x2F;dl-access-during-covid-19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acm.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bulletins&#x2F;2020&#x2F;march&#x2F;dl-access-...</a>

This is a great book, and while you&#x27;re at it you may as well check out the author&#x2F;editor of the book&#x27;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.<p>0 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;homes&#x2F;mahesh&#x2F;papers&#x2F;corfumain-final.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;homes&#x2F;mahesh&#x2F;papers&#x2F;corfumain-final.p...</a><p>1 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cornell.edu&#x2F;~taozou&#x2F;sosp13&#x2F;tangososp.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cornell.edu&#x2F;~taozou&#x2F;sosp13&#x2F;tangososp.pdf</a><p>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fpaxos.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fpaxos.github.io</a>

Along a similar vein, Springer just make &quot;Linear Algebra Done Right&quot; freely available as well — <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;978-3-319-11080-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;978-3-319-11080-6</a>

Took a graduate distributed systems course at UT Austin and it felt like a Leslie Lamport&#x27;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.

Are there any particular books apart from this that would be available on ACM that&#x27;s good to download and read? Any suggestions?

The epub link on that page sends me to an online reader, from which the &#x27;Download&#x27; button does precisely nothing. This might be due to all the browser-armour I&#x27;m wearing, might be a Firefox thing, don&#x27;t know. The PDF link works fine.<p>Anyway, if this is happening to anyone else, just copy the link for the epub button on the main page, and add &quot;?download=true&quot; to the URL (mirroring the pdf link). You will then get an epub file downloaded directly by your browser.

Hey, is anyone able to mirror the ACM archives?<p>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.

On a similar note, does someone know of a resource which explains parallel abstractions&#x2F;languages.

Can someone point me to greatest hits on the ACM?

Can anyone who&#x27;s read this comment on how useful it is for learning the concepts themselves vs. historical context and Lamport&#x27;s biography?

What a welcome contribution. If my lifetime is spent just properly internalising Lamport&#x27;s work, I&#x27;d consider it a life well-lived.

At his age, every time I see a headline about Lamport, my first thought is &quot;shit, has he died!?&quot;.<p>Thankfully not.