Check out "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do. It's still work-in-progress, but covers a big chunk of distributed systems material, is up to date and has good reviews. You can read the 10 out of 12 chapters via Safari Books Online.

The downside is that I pre-ordered the book in November, expecting it in April and it now shows November of this year as the release date on Amazon. I'd be surprised to get it this year at all. Haven't found other books of similar scope and recency though, so I guess I'll wait some more.

I agree, an excellent book. I learned a great deal from it.

Yeah, until now I found it discouraging that most freely available material in distributed systems consisted of either reading lists or terse slides. I've seen people compare to the field to the humanities in that reading the primary sources is the main way people learn, but I've never found that easy going.

edit:

And it looks like a similar question has been asked at http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/4793/start-learning-ab..., with some other recommendations I wasn't aware of.

It's a bit like learning to work on a bicycle by reading physics textbooks.

I have no problem reading the primary sources but where does one who is not in academia without expensive journal access obtain them all? I've tried digging around for pdf's but it seems they're scattered all over the place or locked behind paywalls.

Recommended free online book: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/

Various online lists of further reading: https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368

Answer it there - You don't want me to steal your stackoverflow points, do ya ;)