Distributed

It is a great book to have when you need to do some admin job and want to have a checklist of what to look out for. The book mainly draws from the authors personal experiences and so is filled with practical tips and what to watch out for. I really like the replication part...

This book is an excellent start to learning how to use SQL Server v6.5. It gives an overview of the features that the SQL Administrator would need to know for handling day-to-day tasks and problems with it.

I thoroughly recommend this book. Well worth the money! Easy to understand for both beginners and advanced users.

Among the 6 MSSQL-Server books that I have waded through, everyone of them is good but not everybody has the time and resouces to commit the whole book just for a few programmer-related or administrator-related chapters. Like "Teach Yourself Transact-SQL within 21 days" that accomplishes its objectives to deliver T-SQL entirely at the programming level, this book also delivers by devoting itself essentially to administrating MSSQL-Server. There are a few distinctive features that I like about this book: 1) Every chapter is kept small and makes for assiduous reading easy at one go. 2) The presentation style is highly informal and interactive, focusing on the "you" administator and the tasks on hand. 3) Every section has a "hard-to-miss" header for easy identification of sub-topics. 4) The chapter introduction that highlights and the summary that reviews the core of the chapter without "missing the forest from the trees". 5) The size of the book (469 pages) is not intimidating or demoralizing, which is just about right.

This was just about the only book I could find on the topic of building applications for exchange 4.0. It covers building client applications with the 4.0 forms designer tool (EFD) exclusively. The sample applications helped me understand this tool but the chapters detailing how to expand the applications with VB were very sparse

Well, If I tell you the truth, I believe this product help you definetly to improve the Use of Exchange Server, great book, congrats to Peter J. Krebs

Great book, buy it. (Ok, so I wrote some of the sample code...=

This is an aptly-titled book. Although it contains some technical information and how-tos, its focus is much more on selling and planning projects and developing a successful consulting practice. It should not be counted on for troubleshooting or technical reference. The advice on how to be a consultant is sound. However, I am not convinced that SBS is the best choice for small business technology.

A great reference. Has planning templates, cutomization info, and a lot of other things that make implementing, and billing an SBS install easier.

Just finished reading Josh Feinberg's excellent "Building Profitable Solutions With Microsoft Back Office Small Business Server 4.5."

It is an excellent resource for those of us in the computer consulting business. Although it is specifically tailored to those who wish to make a living installing and servicing SBS 4.5, there is enough information to make it a worthwhile purchase for any computer consultant.

The included CD contains many useful templates and documents that I plan on using in my own business.

Thanks Josh!

The book contains concepts and algorithms in the first half, and then lists (I think 3) distributed operating systems in the back as case studies. The book is very readable and entertaining, assuming you've had a course (or the equivalent) in (single machine) operating systems.

This book covers all major aspects of distributed operating systems at reasonable level of depth -- you can't expect too much detail if you're going to cover all the topics.

There's no examples of "real" code in the text, I think that's a good thing. There are a number of useful algorithms discussed in each chapter.

This book is aging, and a little of the information is already dated (7 years old).

Good, I'm going to use it next semester and I hope to learn so much from it

If you know Andrew S. Tanembaum and know "Modern Operating Systems" you will like this book. It's a upgrade to Distributed Systems and more. You will need this!

Where is the second edition of this book? THis book was awesome but I really need one that is halfway decent for W2K? STEVEN B. THOMAS? Where are you? Hopefully the second one will have a CD that works!

I decided to review all of the registry books, after I had worked with them by my side for several months. I bought this books along with Tim Daniel's Book and Rob Tidrows. While this books was excessive at points with many "tedious unecessary" entries, the mere fact that it is so comprehensive allows it to stand out as the premier reference on the registry. I am extremely impressed with the exception that a books of this nature deserves a better index.

This book has almost too many references but it is good. Only 1 weakness. Hard to follow the organization in some places. But overall this is remarkable!!!

I like this book. It was a big help for me to get started with Weblogic Workshop. I found it to be organized pretty well and the information extremely helpful.
I would recommend this book to someone that wanted to get started quickly with Workshop. But one problem is by the time I got this book and created Web Services with 7.0 then Weblogic 8.1 hit the market.
Also, the BEA documentation is very good and I could have probably gotten by using their resources. However, the amount of documentation and detail is overwhelming. I found this book helpful as well as an excellent starting point for WebServices and Workshop.

If you want to learn Workshop, buy this book! By the end of the book you will be flying thru the tool.

The early chapters go easy and introduce the development environment. This is extremely well written.

And the examples in the early chapters work! You can easily create the web services yourself.

The later chapters loose focus on examples and more just explain how to do the task using workshop. And then the final chapter, "An Online Ordering System", seems to be written by an alein; the one web services does not work and will not work the way it is declared, one of the jave files is missing completely from the text but is provided on the CD. This is the reason for only four stars.

And then when you go to SAMSPUBLISHING web site, they have lost the book completely.

This is a excellent book and does a terrific job taking you through the WorkShop and using it to create Web Services.

I could have probably stumbled through the stuff without going through this book but it would have taken me much longer and I wouldn't have learned as much.

If you want to get up and running quick with this WorkShop tool buy this book and you will be rocking in a short time.

This book presents a clear and high-level overview of the issues and topics of client/server and OO computing. I've worked in the field for a while, so there was not much new material for me. Nevertheless, I still found it a useful read. It presents a coherent and comprehensive conceptual framework for thinking about the many of issues and tradeoffs in the field. The book's layout, format, and style make it readable and useful. It has a reasonable index, bibliography, and glossary. The beginning and ends of each chapter clearly summarize the material. The book's stated goal was to give the reader a fundamental understanding of essential issues rather than a barrage of incidental technical details. I believe it succeeded. I wish I had this book five years ago when I was new to the field of OO applied to business applications.

This book was a pleasant surprise. I think it stands out. Here is why: many books don't survive the test of time. Either the technology is moving to the next buzzwords and the terminology in a just-published book is already slightly obsolete, or a book style is such that it concentrates only on extremely volatile and time-sensitive skills that it usefullness only lasts a couple of years. Of course an author can publish a new edition every two or three years to keep up with the terminology and what is in vogue, and that is why Orfali's "martians" book on client/server is now in its third edition. A better solution would be to have a web site with documents in PDF format that update a published book. While this book is published only two years ago, and it seems to show some of its age by not mentioning the latest Internet buzzwords, such omissions are deliberate exactly to withstand the test of time. Examples abound of different architecture configurations and topologies without ever looking old. The writing style has a nice flow, with wide margins on each page showing summaries written in italics. It never displays too much information, but just what is needed. And it relates how choosing a correct configuration, is actually an evaluation of the best compromises, never dictatorialy stating what is the correct and only solution. The words are carefully crafted, and this book is a good source if you are preparing a presentation and need examples of one-liners or one-page concepts. It is not a reference book of treasure-chest solutions and code snippets. It is more a book to read next to a fireplace and "harden" and make sense of information that you may already have but you are not sure how to frame it, organize it, or rationalize it. The nice flow in this book shows the path.

This book is a little bit dated, but most of what is here still applies. As long as new people are making the shift to OO devleopment, this book will be of great benefit.

First of all, the authors give a very objective view of OO devleopment without a bunch of hype. Then, the book begins by addressing the non-OO way of developing client/server applications and explains how objects can fit in.

After giving a road map of the possible ways to introduce objects into existing systems, the authors go in great detail of client, server, and "glue" OO development. The glue is essentailly the communication mechanism used between the client and server.

To round out the book, the authors give good introductions to object persistence, performance, scaleability, and security. These are all important topics with books dedicated to each of them. Readers will be ready to read the more advanced material after having read what the authors present.

The last two chapters are more speculation than fact, and it would be nice to have a second edition of this book to account for the changes since the book was published in 1998.

As a final note, managers with a techincal background but no OO experience will find the material very useful in coming up to speed on OO client/server development.

I'm currently an undergraduate computer science student here at Youngstown State University, and in the course of research work for a Physics professor here, I have spent the last year struggling with learning what were very new concepts to me. I actually know Cameron in "real life," and on the occaisons I would run into him and try to get some advice on how to get my MPI scripts running correctly, etc., his reponse would invariably be "wait for the book, it will all be in there, I promise." Muddling through several poorly-written primers on programming for our cluster, and material on programming scattered on various part of the web, I can emphatically state my excitement that the book is finally done.

I consider myself to be very much an amateur programmer, which is important. With the increasingly widespread use of inexpensive computer clusters, many amateurs like myself find themselves in the position of having to learn something completely new. Moreover, many researchers don't particularly want to invest a great deal of time in something that is little more than a tool for them to get their "real" work done. For those of us who fall into that category, I think Camereon's book is a godsend. It covers all of the major areas of interest in a technically thorough way, without being too challenging or offputting for a beginner. The book starts with some of the basics of how a UNIX(Linux) system works, and how parallelism and multiproccessing fit in. By the time you start coding, you have a firm grasp of just what is going on. If you're familiar with C++, but have never done any parallel programming, this book is for you.

My personal opinion is that anyone becoming a new cluster user(They've been regularly doling clusters out here in Ohio) should recieve a copy of this book. A wonderful introduction. My only real complaint has been that Cameron didn't write it a year ago :-D

This book covers the MPI (Message Passing Interface) library, the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) library, and the MICO (CORBA) library. If any these libraries were new to you, then this book is would be very beneficial to you.

So many books have been written on PTHREADS, threading, multiprocessing, etc, and yet, this book seems to cover more grounds, teach more concepts, and show you more simple but useful examples that any other one's that I have seen. The books on PTHREADS cover threading, there are a number of books on multiprocessing, networking (Stevens book comes to mind), but as far as generic multiprocessing, and parallel processing is concerned, this book is the key. Hughes and Hughes have written another similar book, but that book mainly covered C++ and threading (hence the title of the book). This book covers other great C++ tools such as the PVM (parallel virtual machine), which to my limited knowledge has not been covered greatly in any other books.

The first couple of chapters cover basic Operating System stuff. I don't know if it's because I have working for a number of years, or not, but the it actually made sense. We all have read the ever popular Modern Operating Systems book, but that book is somewhat dry. Maybe I think that say since I HAD to read the book for my class, but that feeling hasn't changed. This book covered the topics that you NEED to know, if you want to be able to write a program that takes advantage of some of the libraries mentioned above (MPI, PVM, MICO, and PTHREADS). It talks about the benefits, differences, and ideas behind parallel and distributed programming.

The next two chapters are probably the best chapters I have read on the topics of Multiprocessing and Multithreading respectively. The chapters are titled "Dividing C++ Programs into multiple tasks," and, "Dividing C++ Programs into multiple Threads."
I cannot say enough about how good these two chapters cover the topics. They start by the definition of both models, and they peel the onion as each chapter moves along. By the end of the chapter, you have seen examples, different design models for each method, and the pros and cons of each design model. Following these two chapters, a chapter is dedicated to synchronization and issues that go along with that in multithreaded/multiprocessing applications.

PVM, the Parallel Virtual Machine, is covered in chapter 6. This chapter must be my favorite chapter in the entire book. The authors give the following description for PVM:
"The PVM represents a collection of networked computers to the developer as a single logical machine with parallel capabilities."

The authors goes further and says:
"The PVM library is perhaps the easiest way to add parallel programming capabilities to the C++ language."

In general, the PVM is broken down into seven categories:
i)Process Management and Control: Routines used to manage and control PVM process
ii)Message Packing and Sending: Routines used to pack messages into a send buffer and send messages from one PVM process to another
iii) Message Unpacking and Receiving: Routines used to receive messages and unpack the data from the active buffer
iv)Task Signaling: Routines used to signal and notify PVM processes about the occurrence of an event
v)Message Buffer Management: Routines used to initialize, empty, dispose, and otherwise manage buffers between PVM processes
vi)Information and Utility Functions: Routines used to return information about a PVM process and perform other important tasks
vii)Group Operation: Routines used [in] joining, leaving, and otherwise managing processes in a group.

The authors then go in to detail covering the two programming models used commonly with the PVM: SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data), and MPMD (Multiple Program Multiple Data):

"In the SPMD model, the tasks will execute the same set of instructions but on different pieces of data. In the MPMD model, each task executes different instructions on different data"

The topics covered in PVM also apply to the chapter that covered MPI, the Message Passing Interface covered in Chapter 10. The authors go a step further in this chapter and talk about how some of C++ features such as polymorphism, generic programming and templates, and operator overload can be used in conjunction with the MPI to make programming simpler and more efficient.

The authors go into detail in the next few chapters about the Software Engineering aspects of the topics covered. Modeling aspects are covered first, and then applications and design. UML is used to show the readers how to represent concurrent and parallel designs. Flow charts, activity diagrams, class diagrams and state diagrams are used to represent the examples that were covered throughout the book.

A closer look at C++ and Object Orientation covers some advanced topics in the book. Various C++ class types are used in examples to show the modeling aspect and then the designing aspect of concurrent and parallel programming.

The last chapter of the book uses all the concepts covered in the book to implement a full-blown blackboard application. The BB is an approach to collaborative problem solving. The BB is used to record, coordinate, and communicate the efforts of two or more software-based problem solvers. The authors design and implement the BB using various architectural methodologies covered in the book: using the PVM, Threads, and CORBA. The examples certainly put everything that were covered in the book in perspective and enable the user to understand and grasp the topic at hand very simply.

C. Hughes and T Hughes picked a very difficult topic to cover and they did one fantastic job at doing so. The examples are great. The topics are covered very thoroughly, and yet are very understandable. Any series C++ programmer, developer, or architect would benefit lots from this book.

Neat approach when discussing parallel and distributed programming, very good book. Keep up the good work.

Raise the right hand.

I have recently started learning ATL (having read Inside COM by Dale Rogerson and some of Don Box). Teach Yourself ATL was my first ATL book. Bad Move...

His overall approach is, in my opinion, inappropriate. After having read 8 chapters I found myself thinking what do I know? I understand how to use the Wizards, but I still have no idea how the IUknown interface is implemented, or how objects are instantiated. In my opinion the only way to COM/ATL success is to understand what the Wizards are doing. Sure they're great in incredibly speeding up the COM development time but if you don't understand what their doing, your hardly any better off.

Kenn gives you the concepts well enough but concept after concept after concept eventually becomes meaningless unless you can see the dirty detail in action. The book is not a write-off but as a beginners text it didn't suit me.

Personally I found Tom Armstrongs "ATL Developers guide" much better. Instead of developing clients in MFC with all the extra messy details, he used bare-bones console apps which allow you to focus purely on COM/ATL. He talks about what ATL is doing and how the basics of COM is implemented. ATL at this level is dirty, messy stuff but its fundamental.

Very good good book. It's really tech you the basic block of the ATL programming and the background that you need to move from Regular Visual c++ applications to ATL. The writer is going step by step How ever this book it not for Visual c++ beginners or if you are looking to become an expert in ATL. I was more interested in the DB and IIS aspects using ATL but it only give you the general idea.

This book provides a tight, insightful introduction to ATL programming for the windows programmer moving to COM via ATL. Its also extremely useful as a reference tool.

A won't regret purchase and addition to the programmer's bookshelf.

By far, the best book on IDOCs that I have come across. A precise, succinct and down-to-earth literature for picking up skills on ALE/EDI-IDOCs, this book also carries a very user-friendly, real-time and pragmatic approach to learning IDOCs. With an SAP System besides, this book took me just a couple of hours to master the whole of it.

The book starts with a remark - IDOCs are simple to learn, tough to explain. But the authors have dispelled the notion, disproving it totally. It is a handy book for developers/consultants, and I think it is a bare necessity for Project Managers. The time estimate given in the book for accomplishing EDI Solutions stands as a great enlightener for the Project Managers with Integration Projects at hand.

On a scale of one to five stars, this book very badly needs a ten.

Easy to read and excellent in examples.
The best book about IDOCs/ALE.

Excellent reference source for consultants learning about the EDI interface and ALE. The book gives real world answers and cuts straight to the heart of the matter. I highly recommend the book for consultants working on the subsystem side as well as those consultants working EDI on the SAP side of the project.