While Liu’s book is excellent for implementation , you may need supplementary texts for deeper theory:

Applying object-oriented principles to a network, allowing applications to access objects located on different machines. Core Technologies and APIs

Before searching for a free PDF, check your university’s online library. If you find it, download the official chapter on Java RMI (Chapter 5) and the appendix on socket programming. Build the examples. Break them. Fix them. That is how you learn distributed computing.

Distributed computing is no longer a niche field; it is the standard. If you want to build scalable backend systems, work with Big Data, or understand the architecture of modern applications, you must understand these principles.

: The most fundamental paradigm where processes exchange data via discrete messages .

Deep dive into the .

While a direct, free PDF of the entire book is not legally available through the author or publisher, there are legitimate ways to access an electronic version:

In P2P networks, every node (peer) acts as both a client and a server. This eliminates single points of failure and allows scales efficiently without centralized infrastructure. Message-Passing Paradigm

Understanding Distributed Computing: Insights from M. L. Liu Distributed Computing: Principles and Applications

Making hardware, software, or data accessible across a network.