The book is quite good for elementary distributed systems theory. You would not want to design sophisticated systems from nothing but the principles in that book but it does a nice job of outlining the areas of theory that you need to understand in order to excel at it. Each of the chapters hints at topic areas that require a much deeper dive if you want to master distributed systems. Like Wikipedia, it is merely a starting point. For example, the discussion of greedy routing theory barely scrapes the surface of what is known about designing distributed system with approximately optimal aggregate system throughput.

You can get by in many cases without fully understanding the topics in this book. Most popular distributed systems that exist today ignore fundamental concepts in at least one of the theoretical areas discussed. But that is also why distributed systems tend to be brittle or exhibit mediocre scalability. The book doesn't fully explain why some of these areas are important but if you study each of the subject areas, it will become obvious.

What books/resources do you recommend for advanced topics?

Having followed the course in 2010 I can fully recommend the script. It gives an exceptionally comprehensive explanation into the most important distributed computing principles without requiring much (if any) previous knowledge on the topic.

The course helped me a lot to get a grasp on the complexity of the various underlying challenges the distributed computing and routing world is facing (and with it an idea of the speed achievable).

I can recommend anyone enrolled to visit the course in person (most algorithms and solutions are being "discovered" together with the class on the blackboard, which helped me a lot with a deeper understanding), but I found that the script alone already gives a very good foundation of the principles of distributed computing.

I also followed the course in 2005/2006. It was one of the better lectures and I really much enjoyed it at that time.

Would you recommend this for someone who is just beginning with the basics of Distributed Computing and does not have a CS background? If not, any recommendations? :)

I'm very much interested in distributed computing and was recently reading up about things like the Raft consensus algorithm.

Elements of Distributed by Computing by Vijay Garg is great: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Distributed-Computing-Vijay-G...