I have just returned from two wonderful weeks in the rugged NorthWest wilderness. Every time again I am amazed of the magnificent outdoors at only two hours drive from Seattle.

This weeks back to basics is a paper David Richardson reminded me of when we were discussing the merits of Saltzer’s end-to-end paper. It is a note by Saltzer that in the most clear and fundamental way lays out the concepts of naming, addressing, routing and binding in distributed systems. It was republished as an IETF RFC given it importance for the design of internet systems:

Saltzer, J. H., “On the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations”, RFC 1498, August 1993.

If you want to get a more textbook treatment of the topic of Naming, Chapter 4 in Andy Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen’s first edition of Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms is probably what you are looking for. Since then they have published an updated second edition of the book, which you you can now also rent via the Amazon Text Book store.