Today's computing development is being characterized by the rapid development of high speed networks and the increase in computing power. Computing is not any more limited to the supercomputers, PCs and laptops but also smart phones and tablets which are available for billions of users offering high computing performances at low cost and interconnected via Internet. This continuing technological development is leading the increase importance of the distributed computing paradigms and the apparition of new ones. This paper aims to review the most important distributed computing paradigms and the principal similarities and differences between them. This survey is a kind of a brief road map that would be useful for researchers, students, and commercial users.