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.