Distributed

This book explains the subject matter well to the beginners. However, I was very disappointed in the way examples are handled. Actual code examples are very sparse. Most of the time, the author gives few lines of code and explains what you should do next. Secondly, I found the accompanying CD of little use. To begin with, the Source code could not run on PB 5.0. It requires an earlier version. All in all the book gives a good introduction to the subject, but is not hands on.

Good book for programmers just beginning to work with PowerBuilder. Bill Hatfield's language is easy to understand. There are also some useful concepts in this book which may prove useful for advanced programmers.

This book is very useful for beginner

While the book does a very good job of laying out options for building distributed environments, it falls far short in some critical areas. Neither directories, security, PKI, nor directory enabled networks (DEN) are adequately covered. As a matter of fact only security receives any coverage at all.

Security has 11 entries in the index, but none go beyond defining the role of security. There is no mention of how to implement security in a distributed environment.

Directories are not even listed in the index. Directories are crucial to the management and security of networks in a distributed environment. The directory enabled network (DEN) initiative is a standard interoperable approach that will be widely supported (if vendors are to be believed). DEN is absolutely necessary if distributed networks are to provide the reliability and security needed by enterprises.

Closely related to DEN is public key cryptography (PKI) which does not even show up in the index. Enterprises building extra-nets will need the security provided by the use of PKI.

These omissions cause me to give a low rating to an otherwise good book on distributed computing.

Chapter 7 of this book is excellent at covering the issues that are key to bridging the gap between IT and the Business Unit.

IT needs to measure "success" in terms of business-meaningful terms - this book (and chapter 7 in particular) helps redefine IT success and focus IT on the issues critical to business alignment in the coming years.

As someone who spent 24 years in "legacy" environments and who is now in the distributed world I found this book to be some of the most complete guides in print to making the transition.

What I really liked about this book is how the authors skillfully blended the descriptions of technologies in the distributed world with the methods and approach that characterize the "legacy" world. This is because distributed computing has a lot to offer from a technology point of view, but management of distributed systems lags behind the "legacy" world. My move was a lot like migrating from a predictable world of methods, processes and procedures to the wild west.

Some of the specific highlights were: very clear description of client/server systems and the underlying components. I personally gained a lot from the discussions on object technology, building distributed applications, and building extensible systems. The latter was especially useful to me because it exposed me to COM, Java and XML, and how these fit into the picture. Coming from a world where the standard buzzwords were CICS, JCL and the such I needed to fully understand the world in which I now work, and this book gave me an understanding of the technical underpinnings and their strengths and weaknesses.

Where this book blends the "legacy" and distributed worlds is in the chapters that deal with managing distributed systems. I gained two deep insights from this section: (1) managing distributed systems is a quantum leap in complexity from managing host-based systems, and (2) the processes and tools used to manage today's distributed systems have not reached the maturity of those that we used twenty years ago in the mainframe world. The authors did an excellent job of pointing out the challenges and realities of distributed systems management, and did a wonderful job of tying this to service level management using core business objectives as the bridge.

This book is truly a manager's guide that covers a lot of ground in technology and processes. It is too high-level for hand's-on technical folks who have worked in distributed environments, but is a wonderful source of information for people like myself who spent most of their career in mainframes and need to evolve into this wild environment called distributed computing. I enjoyed the book, gained a lot from it and recommend it to my former colleagues who are still in the "legacy" environment.

The content of the book was good. Overall I am pleased with it. The one flaw I have with the book is the number of errors in it. These errors range from spelling errors to grammatical errors to mislabeling of figures (charts) to errors in some of the coding examples. I would have expected the book to have been edited a little better than it was. I would have recommended the book but the publishers need to do a better job editing future editions.

Derek Ball brings PB to developers in a comprehensive, straight-forward manner. The well-done organization, format, and figures make this guide worth reading from beginning to end. The Developer's Tips and appendices are truly useful tools and compliment the main text. Also, this guide's thorough index makes it an excellent reference. The only reason I didn't give it a ten is that it's weak on external DLL information, but then so is every other PB book I've found. Of the current PB books available this is, by far, the one I use most.

I found this to be an excellent book covering many intermediate and advanced topics. This book is definitely not for beginners unless you already have programming experience using Visual Basic, etc. The coverage of changes in PowerBuilder 6.0 with it's migration issue warnings is very helpful. I'm looking forward to using items mentioned in our applications. This will definitely be one of my well used books.

In some places that the book is advertised it is misleading - touting the book as SAP for dummies when actually it is a book on SAP System Administration only. Although it may adequately cover the System Administration (Basis) aspects the book is not helpful for basic SAP functionality - I had more luck with "Teach Yourself SAP in 24 hours" for general SAP.

I just cracked open this book five minutes ago. I'm new to the world of SAP and the aggravation the book has spared me has been well worth the price.

This should give you a hint that the book is well-organized and easily accessible. A little familiarity with SAP is handy, but I don't think it's necessary.

I didn't think it was possible to have a Dummies book for SAP, but it seems that Joey and Jim did it. As an experienced basis admin I read with skepticism, but I truly believe this is a valuable asset for any technical resource looking to venture into the vast world of SAP. Joey provides comical yet expert commentary that would allow anyone new to this difficult landscape to get a leg up. Thanks for the enjoyable and educational read. When are you coming out with SAP for Advanced Dummies?

Another bad book on Web Services. I bought this book as well as Professional XML Web Services, and both are terrible. If you are a developer, then this book doesn't even go into any detail about how Web Services work.
It gives you examples using GLUE which is useless and will fade into complete and utter obscurity. Of course, GLUE is completely incompatible with all the other real SOAP implementations, so if you get this book, you will need to go out and search for a better book, like I'm going to have to right now.

This book is a perfect introduction. It's that simple. Graham Glass, by the way, runs TME a company that is about to build a next-generation computing environment called GAIA which is a peer-to-peer system. Take a peek at themindelectric.com.

Graham Glass obviously has a talent for making complex material simple and easy to digest. This is evident in both the web services toolkit his company has released, called GLUE, and in this book, which provides a comprehensive, very hands-on, easy-to-read, look at web services.

This book covers a wide range of material, from the basics of what web services are and how they fit in the evolutionary path of distributed computing, to advanced topics such as WSDL and UDDI, Java to XML schema mapping, interoperability, and so on. Glass keeps the reader engaged in a hands-on way with a lot of example source code througout the book. The book utilizes the Java-based GLUE toolkit, which is provided on a bundled CD-ROM, to power most of the examples that illustrate the concepts. There is also a chapter on building and consuming web services with .NET and with Weblogic, a J2EE app server.

To bring it all together, there is a chapter that uses a B2B purchasing scenario to illustrate how J2EE(Weblogic), .NET, and GLUE can work together. This chapter is nice because it really gives the reader a sense of how web services really enable cross-platform interoperability, while sticking to a very pragmatic, real-world situation.

Finally, Glass provides an interesting, thought-provoking look at the P2P world and its intersection with the world of web services.

Glass' writing style is entertaining and his personal voice certainly comes through quite clearly. Overall, a very nice balance between educating the user on abstract concepts and keeping the reader busy with examples. Highly recommended.

I found the content repetitive and the points laboured. The information provided could have been easily presented in 10 pages. Instead the author attemps to over-complicate the topic and confuse the reader. I'm not sure who he is trying to impress, but he didn't impress this reader. E-mail connectivity is an important technology. Getting it right can be the difference between a low maintenance, efficient, fast infrastructure and a painfully slow, troublesome and unreliable one. Unfortunatly this book only succeeds in clouding the issues involved.

I bought this book expecting it to cover a much wider area of connectivity.

It focuses on X.400 and particulary SMTP connectivity, not what I really wanted. But it does cover those areas really well.

As well, as just looking at Exchange, the author covers more related technology areas. Good information from the real world.

I bought this book based on my experience that the Digital Press series offers the best books on email in the industry. Kieran McCorry meets that challenge! His writing easily matches that of Redmond, Rhoton, Collin, Avolio and Vixie.

I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but it appears helpful from the parts that I have scanned.

I like the book in question. It covers several fields of DNS and BIND administrating not seen in other books. It also cover advanced fields like for example DDNS. It is clear that the writer knows what he is talking about.

I feel that the book is not for the first-timer in DNS, although it gives a good overview of those items too. You should know a little, and then this book explains why things are the way they are and how to fix your many errors... For people who have looked at DNS, maybe dabbled a litte, it is a great way to learn it the proper way.

Sadly, the Que-layout isn't up to O'Reilly standard, but if you ignore that, it is a really good book.

I liked this book. It covers interesting and relevant fields (DDNS, security concerns, how to interface with DNS from different languages, ...) in addition to the basics, in enough depth to be really useful. It is practical and down-to-earth, with thorough examples, explaining how things work and why. It definitely helped me grok the ideas and concepts behind DNS.

This book was written in a hurry to catch the SMS wave and it stinks from it. Many chapters were written by different people with different styles of writing, some more eloquent than others. Consequenty it makes for bad reading.

It contains numerous inaccuracies and extensive reptition. Clearly nobody did a proper job editing this book in its entirety to create a common style of writing or at a minium, technical and commercial accuracy. Donald J. Longueuil did himself a disservice by putting his name to this.

Each of the authors has their own bias (based upon who they work for) and this comes out clearly in the book. Thiis book esentially becomes a series of sales pitches, rather than a truely independant overview of the SMS/EMS/MMS market.

All in all very disappointing and a complete waste of money.

I was disappointed that this book included practically nothing on the actual SMSC handshaking and protocols, nor about actual SMS, EMS, or MMS specifications, etc.. The book seems geared very much towards management types who are trying to decide whether or not to implement mobile messaging in their business strategy. The history of SMS and case studies of successful text messaging business implementations get focus. It is not a practical reference for an actual developer and provides next to nothing in technical information.

I thought this book was very imformative and helped me understand how I could use my mobile phone in other ways. Certainly the wireless companies do not come anywhere close to properly educating people about other uses for the phone then calling. Thank you.

This book will prevent all but the hardiest of souls from adopting RM-ODP, which is a shame since RM-ODP presents so much that is useful to the architect.

You are much better off learning RM-ODP from the ITU Reccomendations than this book.

If you are already familiar with RM-ODP this book does contain some useful nuggets of information--if you are willing to dig hard enough to find them.

Ms. Putnam's book is disorganized and prolix. It is appalling that she quotes herself in the front matter. "Architechting with RM-ODP" is neither of use to the beginner or valuable as a reference to the practitioner.

There is a lot of good information in this book, and it is much more readable than the specifications. Putman is able to give meaning to a terse and deep standard.

However, there is almost no practical application in her book. The running example is left for a hundred pages at a time. There is little to demonstrate how an architecture affects software design and code.

There is also very little to tie concepts together. When finished with the book, I didn't have an overall view of RM-ODP: just lots of little views.

This is the only book available on RM-ODP, so I recommend this book with that in mind. However, I hope Putman is able to revise this work into a more practicle and cohesive form.

Janis has done a wonderful job of explaining all the key concepts and elements of RM-ODP. Her diagrams are clear, the references are numerous, and you will definitely have a ton of confidence about the RM-ODP once you're finished with the book. I revisited the ISO standards once I finished Putman's book and found the information much more meaningful. Some drawbacks: References to the Zachman Framework (interesting, but that work really didn't move forward appreciably), References to Boehm's Spiral Model (Barry's work is spectacular, but referencing the Rational Unified Process, which is much more mainstream, would have been of great benefit to the reader), and References to some technologies that have disappeared (TINA, for instance). All in all though, don't let that discourage you from getting this book. If you're using RM-ODP, this is THE book to have.

This book provides a great introduction to BizTalk. The author puts the software into its proper context, provides a solid introduction to its architecture, and gives just enough "how-to" to get started.

Reading this book first will give you what you need to approach more in-depth material, e.g. Microsoft Press's BizTalk Server 2000 Documented.

Up front, I should state that I have been working w/BizTalk for the last six months. To say that the documentation currently available on BizTalk is lacking is an understatement. What I particularly like about this book is the fact that several chapters are devoted to the architectural underpinnings of BizTalk (for example, the author describes the way that servers are broken out and what the different databases contain, down to the objects in the databases). He also clearly explains the various concepts within BizTalk such as ports, messaging ports etc. All in all, this book is the best one currently available if you are interested in the architectural and development aspects of BizTalk and don't want to plough through the 1500-page Microsoft tome.

This is an excellent book. I was reluctant to even look at this book, since the word "beginner" was in the title, but given that there are few BizTalk books out there, I gave it a shot. I was very impressed by the depth of content, going much deeper and with much more explanation than the MS docs. If you're a newbie (or even intermediate) to BizTalk, definitely consider this book. It will help you not only to get started up and running, but it will give you a solid foundation as well.