Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: the only book of its kind

At MIT, I took the course 6.852 Distributed Algorithms under Professor Nancy Lynch. It was an excellence course. This books is based on her lecture notes. Before this book, there is really no book that covers these material in rigorious and consistent matter. One usually have to read the actual published academic papers. Because different author may use different notations or models, sometimes it is hard to see the whole picture. This book shows exactly that. The algorithms are presented in a consistent notation, and the models and the assumptions all the explicit, clear and consistent. However, Professor Lynch's lecture style can get really dry and boring, sometimes I can't help felling asleep because the class was so early in the morning. For that, I decided to give it only 4 stars.