If you are considering writing any kind of fault tolerant distributed systems or frankly any client server system (In any language) I highly recommend reading the book "Erlang and OTP in Action." [1] It's a reasonably short read and will make you think through what needs to happen to build a robust system and get you to really understand and internalize the stuff that is talked about in this article in much greater detail.

The only downside is you might start to feel a bit dirty the next time you try to build anything with node.js, eventmachine, twisted or any of the other evented systems that are popular today.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Erlang-OTP-Action-Martin-Logan/dp/1933...