[eddyerburgh]

I just finished the distributed systems section of teachyourselfcs and I now have a solid understanding of a lot of concepts I previously only shallowly understood.

When I started learning, the recommended textbook was Distributed systems: Principles and Paradigms (the new recommendation is Designing Data-Intensive Applications) and the recommended course was MIT 6.824.

6.824 is the first online course that I have completed fully and it was well worth it. I read, took notes, and summarized all required course readings (around 20 papers) and completed the labs, which involved creating a raft-based key-value store. The labs were especially useful because they forced me to really understand the details of the topics I had learned (e.g., MapReduce, Raft, Raft’s log compaction) in order for my code to pass all the tests.

I’m very happy with the results of following the course and I now plan to put the same amount of effort into other topics.

[_____s]

How long did it take you to complete it on your own, including the exercises?

[eddyerburgh]

For the course I would estimate 120-180 hours spread over 6 weeks.

I read the textbook over a couple of months, but I couldn't give you a good estimate in hours.