I am quite surprised that I don't see Roy Fielding's "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" on this list (aka his REST PHD paper).  I have not read many dissertation, in fact i think this is the only one, but I found it very approachable.<p><a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm</a>