Phil Eaton on orienting oneself when beginning the study of distributed systems:

Distributed systems is simply the study of interactions between processes. Every two interacting processes form a distributed system, whether they are on the same host or not. Distributed systems create new challenges (compared to single-process systems) in terms of correctness (i.e. consistency), reliability, and performance (i.e. latency and throughput).

Phil’s recommendations are to find a couple of friends and work together on reading Martin Kleppmann’s book Designing Data-Intensive Applications and working through MIT’s 6.5840: Distributed Systems course.