Course Paths

The preface gives three routes through the book — building systems, studying the theory, and understanding the broader implications — and every route begins with Chapter 1. This page keeps the course-length variants and the timetabling notes for lecturers. The book is more than any course should attempt, built to be carved into subsets: each row below names its core in reading order, and the final column is everything else and how to treat it.

Suggested course paths through the book. Each row names its core in reading order — enter at the first item; the final column is everything else and how to treat it, a dash marking a path that leaves nothing out. The appendices serve every path.

Reader or course	The core, in reading order	The rest — sample or skip
Postgraduate course (either length)	Parts I–IV, the conceptual core	Parts V–VII, sampled by the course’s emphasis
One-semester course	Part I entire; the spines of Parts II and III; the Part IV chapters nearest the emphasis	Everything else, as time allows
Two-semester sequence	The whole book, broken between Parts IV and V	—
Theory-leaning course	Part I; Parts II–V entire, with Appendix A alongside; Chapter 21	Part VI and the rest of Part VII
Engineering-leaning course	Part I; Parts II and VI entire; the Part III and IV chapters the project at hand needs; Chapters 21 and 22	Everything else; Chapter 14 first where the project learns as well as composes
Systems-and-society course	Part I; Parts IV, V, and VII	Parts II, III, and VI; the spines of II and III as background
Practitioner	Chapter 1; Chapters 3 and 4; then Part VI; then Parts III and IV; then Chapters 21 and 22	Everything else, Part V last
Curious reader	Part I, then Chapters 22 and 23	Everything in between — every good bit of it

Spines and seams. A part’s spine is the chapters the rest of the book leans on hardest: in Part II, Chapters 3 and 4; in Part III, Chapters 6, 7, and 8, plus Chapter 5’s speech-act half. The two-semester sequence breaks at the seam between Parts IV and V: the first term ends with agents that interact, the second opens with agents that learn. Two timetabling notes. Chapters 20 and 21 belong in the same term — Chapter 20 hands its instruments to Chapter 21 mid-argument, and the seam is not built to survive a term boundary. And the natural capstone for a project-based term is Chapter 14’s question put to the bench: one coordination task solved twice, composed and learned, and judged under Chapter 21’s discipline.

Part VI’s opening pair is printed build-first: Chapter 16 constructs the runtime by hand, and Chapter 17 then takes its six services to market. A course that wants the survey before the build may reverse the pair: the framework chapter states the anatomy in full, and the runtime’s design brief restates the six services it implements.