Distributed

I was very disappointed with this book. My expectation of a book titled "...Notes from the Field" was that it would be jam packed with detailed information about how to use the software. In other words, the tricks of the trade and specific opinions (with details) about what works and what doesn't. For example, how to work around the nuances (or flaws) of the first release of OLAP Services.

What I found was a high level discussion about a wide range of topics, none of which seemed to be in depth or detailed enough to be useful. Too many topics were given a single paragraph or two. This may provide a starting point for further research, but is hardly enough to help someone through an implementation.

It was helpfull when stuck with prblem

From a high level, this book definitely gives the reader strategic deployment advice. Unlike many other books, this one gives very realistic performance figures. Although this book does not go into details about all aspects of configuring SQL Server, it does give details where appropriate. This book and Delany's Inside SQL Server (an EXCELLENT in in-depth analysis of SQL Server mechanics) is definitely a one-two punch.

Most implementations of SQL Server will probably not need either of these books, but if your SQL Server is a big OLAP or OLTP server with many users/complicated queries, these two books will give you all you need to tune your implementation to its best performance possible.

However, I haven't found a book that discusses SQL Server's powerful yet very under-utilized replication features.

I bought this book in Nov, 2002. I read it in 2 days. It covers all the areas of the test, but it's too superficial to be of any use. I would suggest you to buy a EXAM CRAM.

I bought this book in addition to the official curriculum that MSPress publishes. I took the test today (4/18/02) and there might have been two questions on the test that this book covered. The official Microsoft book was more complete but in Microsoft's usual manner it is difficult to always discern what is needed and what is overkill. You are better off learning COM and ATL 3.0 because my test was very heavy on both topics.

This book goes over the topics covered on the exam (a big plus!) but it would have been helpful if they expanded the exam watch section to really cover items on the test. As the book is written, the exam questions were just to specific (and on specifics not covered in the book) for me to pass.

I think this book is poorly written. The authors go a long way describing all kinds of taxonomies (look at the abundance of 3d diagrams such as Figure 4.11) without letting the user grasp the major ideas. Just check the discussion on the 10 types of distributed databases in chapter 4.

They also spend a lot of time and paper describing relatively simple concept without actually making the concepts any clearer. Some concepts never get defined so it's not clear why they had to be mentioned, check 13.4.2 and try to figure out what the convoy effect is.

I think the main problem of this book is that it tries to please to wide an audience: undergrad students, database researchers, and practitioners. I don't think the book is of much value for any of these categories of people.

This book was chosen as the main text for a distributed database systems graduate Computer Science course I recently took. For a CS course on the subject, it is an obvious pick since not many related texts exist on the market. The text is good, but needs updating since it was published in 1999. Research papers from IEEE and ACM were relied on as supplementary reading, since research in DDBS continues, and much has been written in the last four years.

I'm a practicing DB engineer. I bought the book since it seems to be a popular graduate level textbook, and I needed to expand my understanding of distributed, federated, and multi-database systems. The book provides a broad overview of concepts and alternative architectures. There is some detailed theory in the text, which won't be useful to most DB practicioners, but if you prefer diving right into the deep end of new topics, this book is a good place to start. No info in this book on specific products or vendor approaches. I'm still climbing this learning curve, so I can't compare this to other books that are widely available (several dozen right here on Amazon.com.) A related topic, apparently still being researched, is database integration. This book touches on that topic (without calling it that), but so far the best info I've found is in IEEE and SIGMOD journals. I don't have any complaints about readability, perhaps because I bought the book expecting to take plenty of time studying it.

If you want a step by step instruction and clear, concise comments of creating an application, then this book is not for you. In order for you to grasp the "True" favor of this book, you need to understand the basic concepts of OOP. I'll give it A Five Start Rating if this book were titled "HOW TO CONNECT A DATABASE USING RDO"

I too bought this book for its coverage of RDO. Yes there are a few issues related to it's early release date (it takes about 15 minutes to update every rdoPreparedStatement reference in the book to rdoQuery). And there is a little code debugging. But, on the positive side, it does provide some really great examples to get you going with RDO. I have found it to be one of the most helpful books I own. Those folks, who tossed it without really seeing what it has to offer, lost out.

If the previous reviewers could look past the end of their noses, they would see that there is a lot of worth while coding examples in this book. The problem definitions are clear and the solutions work. Many of the problems that the previous reviewers found could easily be changed. Maybe they just need to be a little less wet behind the ears and realize that no matter what book they buy, they are going to have to pick and choose and modify what they use. There's a step by step 21 day book out there if that's what you want.

This one is strictly for amateurs. Perhaps the last section on customized Visual Basic programming is better. The first 4/5 ths of the book are Very Superficial. No details at all. I cannot believe a team of "high-powered Sql Server experts" came up with this cotton candy. Okay for an introduction if nothing else.

Catherine is right. I tried to work through Chapter 2 which was touted as buildig a "simple" package. The package was simple but I spent hours on it trying to follow poorly laid out directions and missing parts. Chapter 2 needs a redo so that one heads into the rest of the book with confidence in the authors.

This book does not provide examples of sufficient quality and number. Examples lack in the explanation of the master plan and the end result, as well as the specifics of the data models involved.In fact, those examples that are there, have errors, especially Chapter 2.
Although useful, the book needs a revision.

This book was originally written in French, and whoever translated it was not paying attention when they did so. Horrible grammar and word usage mistakes detract from what would already be only a fair book. The stated purpose of the book is to unify various theories and approaches to multi-agent systems, and to this end uses a large array of redundant terminology.

I do not recommend this book at all.

Ferber's book is a confusing read for anybody approaching the subject for the first time. He attempts to categorise multiagent systems, but many of his key terms are vague. The
accumulation of distinctions without overall purpose becomes
irritating. Despite all the classification, there is no clear overall taxonomy and no hard code. Organisation is poor. A clear taxonomy and a detailed study of an implementation for each category plus code would have made a much better book. There is useful stuff here, but finding it is like looking for matching socks in a laundry bin.

I have not read the book. but i know the author is a famous prof. in the area.

If you have a computer degree and if you are not new to computer programming then this book is not for you. Anybody who has have experienced with any microsoft technologies before reading this book will find it extremely useless. Its a lot better to go through the books of windows architecture then this book. Those books will give you real insight but this book won't.

The author's review is accurate. This book is not for senior architect's, MCSDs, etc. This is a good reference book for a jr. developer or pm trying to get a grasp of DNA & MSF. The upside is a one-stop high-level reference of most of the Microsoft technologies. The downside is that you must buy another book that provides more granularity of a technology such as ASP or XML. This book will provide sufficient information to determine which technologies to pursue from the vast world of DNA development.

Programmer geeks won't like this book because it's not full of code and nauseating technical detail, but if you're a PM, VP, or CIO and moving your company's technology into the Microsoft Solution Space, this book is a great jump-start. It's an easy read (I read the bulk of it on a cross country flight) and provides a pretty complete high-level view of all the Microsoft piece-parts. Overall, I'd call this a book that needed to be written.

Joe@ASPGurus.com

I tried running the first example in this book using the CD that came with the book and followed the directions. I could not get it to run on Windows 2000. I could not return the book since I had used the CD. That's a catch-22.

I went to Sun's web site and downloaded the J2EE tutorial, which is free. Of course there are several things to download to get a complete running environment, but if you follow their instructions very carefully, everything works! Perhaps Sun's instructions were more thorough than this book's.

So if you don't already have a Windows 2000 J2EE environment up and running, don't start with this book.

When I first looked at the used price for this book I thought this book had to be pretty bad. Nevertheless I bought it and it turned out to be a pretty good EJB book, at least for beginner and advanced levels. I haven't tried the examples though, which was one of the complaints about this book. I was just looking for additional reference on EJBs at a low price and this book was a great buy!

"Instant Enterprise JavaBeans" does an excellent job of explaining EJB technology, how to develop programs to use the technology, and how to deploy those programs. Using the reference implementation that comes with the Sun J2EE, the author covers key aspects of developing and deploying EJB applications. The author starts with a good explanation of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition including n-tier architecture and then demonstrates a basic "hello world" EJB class. Using this class, the author shows us how to use the Deploy Tool to deploy and run EJB applications. In each chapter, we are taken step-by-step through the entire process required to produce working EJB applications. The author shows us how to develop stateless and stateful session beans and entity beans using bean-managed and container-managed persistence. Several clear examples of each type of bean are discussed. He then uses the different types of beans to create a more complex example that even includes an interface to a web ready cellular phone. In later chapters, he shows us many of the additional features available in EJB servers including creating container-managed transactions, authenticating users, and customizing applications using deployment descriptors. The author finishes up with a brief discussion of performance issues. Even though the book only discusses the J2EE reference implementation, by covering the basic functions found in an EJB server we learn what to look for in other EJB servers. My one complaint is that the index is almost useless, even lacking entries for such basic topics as "transaction" and "database".

I expected a lot more from this book that while admittedly was the first that covered the topic, but did not really explain things in detail. Half of the book is on configurations that you can download from vendor web sites and the real design issues are never really addressed. The author runs a web site on teh topic and also is a known expert so this made the book more dissappointing.
The first O'Reilly book I have ever regretted buying.

This deals mainly the web based load balancing. This is the simplest solution since the sessions only last for ms. It has a good hands on approach to router configuration and network design but lacks hardcore application design that this topic deserves.

There is no discussion on complex systems which require sessions to last for days and how to distribute state between multiple servers. There is also no discussion on locking mechanisms, determining load, primary/backup determination, latency across WANs, distributed objects, DB failover, server synchronization, heartbeat implementations, shifting load for scheduled down time, or dynamic router configuration or alternative scheduling mechanism apart from round robin.

I think the title "Web Server Load Balancing" would be a more appropriate title and if that is what your goal is then this is the book for you.

This publication is good for an quick introductory view of server load balancers. Users of load balancing products from certain manufacturers will benefit from the configuration options discussed in the final section of the book. For a more in-depth discussion, I would recommend Kopparapu's text "Load Balancing Servers, Firewalls, and Caches".

Of the roughly 15 certification study guides (for various certifications) that I read over the last 4 months, this one is by far the worst!! This book reads like it was written by a committee and then not edited at all. The organization is atrocious, the book is riddled with typographical, grammatical and technical errors - several per page - and the technial information presented that is needed to pass the exam is incomplete. For example, the tables that list the specifications for the different SCSI standards is simply incomplete. Also, this book is a perfect example of why sophisticated desktop publishing tools do not belong in the hands of amateurs: the book is over-designed to the point that the layout and design in many places is very distracting. After having taken the exam, I seriously doubt that I could have passed it if I would have relied on this book alone.

This book is poorly organized and redundant. The book just seems to babble on and on going over the same misinformation. The organization of the book is horrible, and the visual appeal of the book is simply non-existent.

I think the book gives only cursory information regarding the Operating System aspects of the test. If you don't know the basics of Netware, Windows and Linux, you aren't going to learn them with this book. If you don't know the hardware aspect, the book contains a great deal of information, but it would help if that information were organized and accurate. I think I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to Certification books, but this one was pretty bad. If the Exam Cram had been available when I purchased this, I would have never bought this one. As it is, I wasted $50.

The practice exams provided on the CD seem to be a bit more accurate and usable than the text, but the CD is hardly worth the price paid for this book. If your method of study is to sit and run through practice tests over and over I guess this book might actually work for you. It's a typical CompTIA exam, so it's not very difficult at all, but I don't think book is going to help anyone prepare, it didn't do much of anything for me.

This book, while not perfect, does provide the information you need to pass the Server+ exams. Server+, unlike the A+, is a tough exam- you really need to be looking at a couple of resources, AND have hands-on experience.