Distributed

too much source code and javadoc (one third of the book!). covers many areas but superficially

The author provides excellent examples and the source is available. I like the fact that this is a "simple" book. So many today are thick, bulky paperweights with poor examples or confusing theory. This book is the opposite. I could easily take the lessons and implement them within a few hours.

My only regret is that the author did not spend time telling us why his rather lightweight API was better than an EJB -or- when to use his approach and when to use EJB's (transaction management?, security?, sessions?).

While this book contains excellent practical, real world examples, it is a little light-on in some aspects. Perhaps some of the API documentation at the rear could be sacrificed for further discussion of design issues. It is more readable than Reese's Database Programming with JDBC and Java, but a little frustrating in that the excellent code examples are not available for download or on CD. Otherwise excellent for those who need to get to work.

I have gone through this book and I did not like it. Look's
like Michi's book is the best so far.

This book is clearly a reference, and research material rather than a hands-on programming guide. While there are many code fragments to support the authors' explanation of concepts, and the largest single chapter is on CORBA programming there is no single project built throughout the book as is often the case in programming guides. I much prefer this approach of being a reference rather than building a project. For example, code or diagrams illustrate things such as SII, DII, DSI, IFR, Exceptions and Any, which gives a competent programmer enough to experiment with the various bits of CORBA. For implementation using BOA, some good diagrams show implementation option using the TIE approach, handy for Java, which has single inheritance. It would be useful though to have some code fragments of a POA implementation in this section.

The book has three parts. The first part covers the basic foundation concepts of distributed computing showing how different distributed technologies (eg RMI, DCOM, RPC) need to find solutions to the same issues.

Parts 2 and 3 give an in-depth look at distributed systems and CORBA with much to study. The role of object adaptors is explained and the POA architecture is compared to the better-known BOA. This is well diagrammed, again some POA code would help. This is where the book becomes more than a programming book and a serious study of CORBA features, such as Naming Service, Trading Service, Event Service and Query Service. Additionally there is a detailed discussion of performance and consistency issues with a CORBA Caching implementation. This for me was the most interesting part of the book. Object caching in a distributed environment gives you much to think about, and clearly much thought has been put into the issues, such as scalability, cache consistency, object eviction etc. Other issues such as distributed transaction services including 2PC and 3PC are well covered.

Detailed discussion of CORBA services and distributed systems is not trivial reading, but rather for serious study. I notice that Douglas Schmidt has written the foreword. His name is well known to anyone that reads CORBA research material, which gives confidence to the quality of material.

In Summary, this is not a simple programming book. There is no downloadable code or CD and apart from some early OrbixWeb examples is not specific to any ORB implementation. It is a serious look at issues of distributed object systems with a heavy emphasis on CORBA and would be recommended for anyone interested in further study of distributed object systems. There are exercises at the end of each chapter, but there are no answers found in the book, it would be helpful to have them available in a later version of the book or on a web site.

I am pleased to find a book on distributed objects systems. this book has given me the needed information that i have been looking for in the field of transaction processing systems. it does cover CORBA to a great level given the reader the chance to see some solutions and the independency of programming languages. i believe it can be used as a text book in the field of Object-Oriented Design or programming where students can aplly either JAVA or C++.

A book about XML and distributed systems, published during 2002, and no discussion about XML Web services?? Makes me wonder how old the content is. I am an experienced architect and developer on different platforms and I found this book completely useless.

The author obviously is a creative and intelligent person and his work presents several fantastic ideas and concepts. However, his writing style is almost stream-of-consciousness. The nuggets of true value in this book must be gleaned from excessively wordy paragraphs and multiple tangents to explain trivialities. The result is that beginners will likely get lost or confused, while the experienced reader will get bored. I would love to see a second edition of this book wherein the content has been edited by an experienced technical editor to clean up the verbiage and make the book more concise and clear.

I am in consultancy field from past several years and got my hands on this book last week. It's good. I agree that this is a lasting work, with collection of ideas for applying XML to everything (well almost). I have also done lots of XML work and usually go through almost all the books on the subject, but this one has some extra value. I liked the explaination, which serves both for beginners and advanced modelers. I am also an architect for several systems and was quite impressed with the model presentation. Another important and good thing is that this book does not insist that you know lot about customary UML knowledge. The schematics are simple and easy to grasp for anyone.
You can have this book even on the road, and I promise it would add value to whatever you know about this subject. I would suggest to buy this book for sure.

The main problem I find in this book is that Edwards uses an example, and then to build upon it adding more functionality, extends it...again and again etc. You are left with a confusing hierarchy of classes.
So, if you want to jump in, find out which classes are needed to build clients and services, and get to it, anything by this author is not worth your time.
You are either forced to use a hierarchy like he does ( which is a bad idea ) or back track through every one of is classes to find out what functionality you want.
The Wrox book on Jini might be the best book around.

The only reason I even gave it 2 stars was because if you do want to learn about the lower level/ non utility classes and how they work the first few chapters are ok for this.

Also, god forbid you have a question for the author...don't expect a response.

This book looks like it was rushed into publication. The example code is formatted incorrectly in every example and much of the text is straight out of Edwards' "Core Jini" (a better book but somewhat outdated). I also don't like Edwards' informal style of writing. The text is peppered with colloquialisms and redundancy and is generally not concise. He explains the one to four page code chunks awkwardly in text before or after the code rather than provide useful comments in the code. The comments that are in the code are sometimes obvious like documenting a function "addRates" as "adds a new currency exchange rate". I hope Edwards is writing a better book for Jini 1.2. Keith, if you are, let me know and I'll help you with that pesky English.

If you learn better from an example than from a dry reference, this book will be a great way to get into Jini.

It has little by the way of background explanation or reference material, but the example code (and the instructions on installing, configuring and running the various parts of Jini) are comprehensive and detailed, building into two interesting case studies - a chat system and a distributed remote storage system demonsrating all the Jini features.

For discussion, hints, tips and experience get "Core Jini". For a reference get "Jini in a Nutshell". For the best and most interesting examples, get this book.

I agree with other reviewers who have said that this book lacks issue for developers. The examples, and diagrams, are absolutely atrocious. In addition, I don't think that it offers a decent overview of CORBA. Indeed, the information is all there (that is, overview info), but it is embedded in a dry, repetitive, and big-worded style. Also, I wish that writers would someday learn what a split infinitive is, in order for them __to hopefully stop__ using them all the time!

Some good titles coming out soon. Let's hope.

-Nathan

This is a good book for a broad overview. Essentially, it is an executive summary in book form. The content is complete and useful, but the style is dry and the presentation uninspired. This is the bran-flakes of CORBA: good for you, but not particularly enjoyable. It is also almost useless for developers (but it doesn't seem to be targeted towards them either).

What it is: A good introduction to what CORBA is and what it offers. The sections on the services and the IDL should provide a nice summary for the technical manager. The descriptions and comparisons of other distributed technologies are informative, and the systems engineering section is littered with information a manager needs to consider for a distributed development effort, with or without CORBA. What it is not: The book does not provide much for the developer. It does not contain any nuts and bolts insight for the new developer, but does state that their is approx 6 mo. rampup required. Overall: I thought that this is a book which should be read by any new manager and developer considering CORBA. Likely to be a reference for a manager and less to a developer, but definitely worth reading. A good companion book to this (opinion) would be Java Programming with CORBA, Vogel - Duddy (ISBN 0-471-17986-8) Small quip : Smalltalk community would appreciate "Smalltalk" instead of "SmallTalk".

At first glance, this appears to be a descent book on
JavaSpaces. However, on closer examination, you'll find the
book riddle with errors and with blante omissions in the
example code.

But the biggest shortcoming of the book is that there is
no link or URL to the source code - and no there's no way to
contact the author either.

In short, it's book about examples and but the examples may
not work as written (for instance, the parallel programming
example at the end doesn't work and SpaceUtil class is a mess.)

Pretty good examples. BUT the thing which surprised me is that there is no URL for downloading example source code or CD with the book. Before you can really run the examples in this book, you need click in source code. Can you believe this? What a pity! I would have rated it higher if the URL for downloading code was provided.

For a beginner in JavaSpace as me, I think it is a good book. Organization of the topic is good. Examples are in very details and easy learning/ understanding.
....

Thanks to Microsoft Press's bundling of these 4 resource kits together, you may find yourself spending $200 for content you can already get for free. I only wanted the SQL RK, and all of the printed contents are already available as FREE whitepapers from MS web site. The tools are moderately interesting, but not, in my opinion, worth the entire cost.

Those people also interested in Exchange, SMS and SNA Servers might find in convenient to have it all in one place, but not me.

Now to find a way to return this ripoff. I'll certainly never buy another MS Press resource kit.

This kit is a bit expensive considering that most of the content is available online. But if your time is valuable or you like to have printed copy to look at it's worth it. What I found most helpful is the examples and information that comes on the CD.

As an SMS administrator, the BORK has paid for itself ten-fold

Micro$oft is famous for its ability to push out new development technologies. The reason behind this planned obsolesence is obvious, every time they come out with something new people will have to open their wallets to "keep up."

DCOM is just another disposable technology. As such, it was a complete failure; one that the marketing folks at M$ have tried to bury as quickly as possible under an avalanche of .NET hype.

DCOM was hard to port because, like COM, it is based on a binary standard (i.e. a standard that changes when you leave x86 and go to 64-bit RISC). Not only that, but DCOM doesn't support distributed transactions. Worst of all, DCOM is a very, very complicated technology to use. Three strikes... YOU'RE OUT!

The half-wit MBAs at Micro$oft realized their mistake and have abandoned DCOM, leaving it forever in the backwaters where the only record of its sorry existence are stupid books like this.

I have no idea why someone would want to buy this book. Folks, this is a dead technology. It is no more. It is an ex-techology. If you buy this book, you are lying to yourself. This book will sit an gather dust, unless you can find more productive uses for it...like burning it to stay warm.

I been a computer programmer for 15 years! Using Visual Basic for about 2 years. Found that this book gives high level overview of com and dcom. It is easy read and easy understand but, must have good computer background to follow it. If you want to know more about dcom you must buy this book !

Being a student of Mr Freyberg at university, I found this book to be inadequate to my needs. Studying during my exam time I found that it was too brief and points were made without proper explanations making it all very unclear to me.

Roger Tagg, I would like to thank you for this great book. I would definately recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. It is rich in content, and can help even the novice user understand it. If you have never been interested in Distributed Systems, you will be after this. Keep up the good work.

If you're one of those poor souls who think they can break into the "miracle of SAP," think again.

Those big private sector implementations are long gone, and public sector implementations are a nightmare! SAP was not developed for government operations...quite the opposite.

Stay away from this one!

This is a high-level view of an R/3 ASAP implementation. It is too light for detailed planning, but does cover the implementation process sufficiently for project managers and implementation team members new to the SAP R/3 environment.

Strengths: The author does an excellent job of explaining the R/3 environment and the ASAP implementation approach. Each chapter contains useful advice, and the way the information is presented will make the development of a work breakdown structure and project plan a fairly straightforward task. It is clearly written and well illustrated, and provides complete coverage of the implementation, albeit at a high level. I like the fact that post implementation requirements are addressed, which is something that is unfortunately not considered until too late in a project.

Weaknesses: This book begs for checklists, an example work breakdown structure and end-to-end project plan. I did not like the superficial way security planning was addressed - the information provided in the chapter devoted to that topic is so generic as to be useless. Since the book is aimed at guiding architects, administrators and technical members of the implementation project team the accompanying CD ROM lent no value to the book because sample test questions for SAP certification have nothing to do with an ASAP implementation. The CD ROM's storage could have been put to much better use had checklists, project plan templates and other ASAP deliverables been provided instead.

Overall this book is not as valuable to its intended audience as it is for project planners and managers. It can be used as a valuable reference for developing an RFI or RFP for an ASAP implementation. It can also be effectively used as a training guide to prepare an IS/IT department for an implementation because it does give a complete picture of what needs to be done, and to an extent, why. It merits 3.5 stars in my opinion, but I'll give it the benefit of 4 instead of 3, which are my only rating choices.

I got this book based on a recommendation of an associate who liked the way it laid out the implementation of a complex software suite. I am not a SAP R/3 specialist, but am an IS/IT consultant who develops and implements service level management solutions and also manages projects of the complexity and scope of an R/3 implementation. Moreover, I have been providing consulting services to a company that does specialize in R/3 integration, so reading this book became important for a number of professional reasons.

Things I most like: the book is an easy read and is laid out in a sequence that allows you to fully understand the issues and factors, and tasks and deliverables required to implement R/3 using SAP's ASAP approach. I loved the clear illustrations and the sequencing of tasks. I had no problem understanding this book even though I had never implemented (or even supported R/3). I saw numerous parallels between the R/3 implementation requirements and those of past projects in which I had participated. When I was in the mainframe world a book this complete and clearly laid out would have been worth its weight in gold. In fact, the clarity and information contained in the book is much better than anything I have read or used in *any* environment.

I found none of the major shortcomings pointed out by previous reviewers. I think the book addresses security in the detail called for because this implementation aspect is tailored to each enterprise and no single book can possibly cover it in detail. I also found the information presented on two levels: one for technical staff and the other for business process owners, both groups will be playing a big role in any implementation. Perhaps if the business and technical information were segmented in the book it would be more accessible to both groups; however, it would also break the flow of the book. I personally like it the way it is. I do agree that the CD ROM contains material that has nothing top do with the book's topic.

Overall, I learned a lot about SAP R/3 ASAP implementation and general issues and factors for any large-scale application implementation from this book. The author did an excellent job of structuring the book to correspond to project phases and stages, and the well designed illustrations greatly aided the text. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is going to be involved in an R/3 ASAP implementation, or who needs a good model for planning the implementation of any complex enterprise application suite. It earns 5 stars from my point of view.