The FrogNet Library
FrogNet is documented the way it was built — from first principles, and provably. One book explains the ideas to anyone; the other is the engineering manual you build a network from. Read either free.
How to Think Like a Frog and Magnum Croakus are retained in full. Their HTML editions now include a substantial current implementation chapter, with targeted notes at mechanisms that changed. The original references, diagrams, examples, command material and learning documents remain below.
Croakus: current FD&F chapter · Think Like a Frog: current programming surface · Ribbit programming guide
The two volumes are a matched set — the same architecture at two depths. Start wherever you stand: the paradigm if you want to understand it, the manual if you want to run it.
Book One · The WhyHow to Think Like a Frog
Networking for the 21st Century
Networking for the 21st Century — the ideas behind the network.
Every network in use today rests on assumptions that made sense in 1969. This book takes them apart and rebuilds them for the world we actually live in — fifty years of lessons in networking, programming, and hardware moved into this century. It starts in plain English, then walks the thirteen shifts that make FrogNet different, and ends with what the system is and does today. If you read one thing first, read this.
The videos are the other half of the documentation — watch the series →
Book Two · The HowMagnum Croakus
How to Work Like a Frog
How to Work Like a Frog — the working companion to How to Think Like a Frog.
The complete engineering guide: how to install a node, how the mesh discovers itself, how the floating database is elected, how UnREST and semantic compression move memory instead of messages, and how to write your own handlers. When it shows a command, it is the command. Deep enough to build or deploy the network from — with worked examples, wire traces, and a falsifiable simulator throughout.
You're curious what "the network is the database" means, or why a mesh that owns itself matters. Begin with How to Think Like a Frog — plain English first, no code required.
You're ready to install a node, write a handler, or deploy across sites. Open Magnum Croakus — every command, wire trace, and worked example you need to work like a frog.
Everything in these is free and always will be. They are the only prerequisite for most of the work going on in the guild — and they are also a distributed systems course that happens to describe a system you can go and run. Election and convergence, routing with no central authority, codec design, transport adaptation under real degradation, tuple spaces back to Gelernter and Carriero in 1985: each is a lecture somewhere, and here they are one system that has to make them work together. Students and self-teachers are welcome to take all of it and owe nothing. If you are here to learn → · If a chapter reads badly, tell me →
Standalone pieces that go deep on one idea — pulled from the books or written alongside them.
The 1969 assumptions FrogNet replaced, one by one — the spine of How to Think Like a Frog.
Read → EssayWhy request-reply leaves the wire idle, and what it looks like to exchange memory instead.
Read → ArticleStarve the link until everything else breaks — and watch what keeps running.
Read → For devsWrite the values, not the plumbing — the shapes an application takes on a tuple space.
Read → OverviewSplit, merge, elect, re-form — the network as something that stays alive through failure.
Read → AnnouncementThe short form of the result, written to be forwarded: what was starved, what survived, and why it matters.
Read → WalkthroughConfig and setup end to end, finishing on a node that reboots into a running FrogNet and is discovered on its own.
Read → WalkthroughWhat happens after the node comes up — how it finds the network it belongs to and is assimilated into it.
Read → CaseFrogNet under the hardest load: coordinating autonomous ground vehicles over narrow, flaky links.
Read → CaseVehicle autonomy in the customer’s own language: every vehicle sees the same operational picture, and a sensor found by one is available to all.
Read → ReferenceThe physical side: what a node is built from, how it is wired, and what connectivity looks like before any software runs.
Read →The build manual's appendices, linked directly, plus print-ready copies of both books. Everything free.
Every command, helper, daemon, and file the book uses, grouped by the job it does.
Appendix DOne system through three stages, with first-order numbers — the adoption argument in full.
Appendix EThe working vocabulary of the whole stack — Pond, Chorus, DatabaseHost, UnREST, SotF — in one place.
The full build manual as a document. Open in Word and print or save as PDF.
Read onlineThe paradigm book, in the browser. Networking for the 21st century.
AccessGNU General Public License, version 2 only. Download the stack and the manual directly — nothing to request.
Free to read · free to build on
Both volumes are free. When you're ready to run FrogNet, the source is free too — GPL, for any use including production.