Thinking in Promises: Designing Systems for Cooperation

Burgess, Mark

ISBN 10: 1491917873 / ISBN 13: 9781491917879

Published by O'Reilly Media, 2015

About this Item

1st edition, 1st printing. Covers have some slight edge wear and light rubbing. First page has a tiny erasure mark in the top corner, otherwise pages are clean and binding is tight.

Seller Inventory # 9957537

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Thinking in Promises: Designing Systems for Cooperation
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1491917873
• ISBN 13: 9781491917879
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Business

About this title

Synopsis

Imagine a set of simple principles that could help you to understand how parts combine to become a whole, and how each part sees the whole from its own perspective. If such principles were any good, it shouldn’t matter whether we’re talking about humans on a team, birds in a flock, computers in a datacenter, or cogs in a Swiss watch. A theory of cooperation ought to be pretty universal, so we should be able to apply it both to technology and to the workplace.

Such principles are the subject of Promise Theory, and the focus of this insightful book. The goal of Promise Theory is to reveal the behavior of a whole from the sum of its parts, taking the viewpoint of the parts rather than the whole. In other words, it is a bottom-up, constructionist view of the world. Start Thinking in Promises and find out why this discipline works for documenting system behaviors from the bottom-up.

About the Author

Mark Burgess is the founder, CTO and principal author of Cfengine. For the past 20 years, he has led the way in the theory and practice of automation and policy based management. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management (“convergence”) and formalised cooperative systems in the 2000s (“promise theory”). He is the author of numerous books and papers on Network and System Administration and has won several prizes for his work.