Distributed

This book covers an area of increasing importance, ie the design and implementation of modern distributed object systems. It combines details of the technologies, eg. CORBA and COM, with design notations and issues, eg. UML and scalability. As such, it fills a very important gap in the market and deserves to be successful. I know of no other book that tackes these issues in the same coherent manner.

I have been teaching these topics for the last three years on undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and have had to use a variety of different literature resouces. This book now provides me with an excellent core text - well written and presented, with good explanations of complex issues.

Many thanks, Wolfgang. I can thoroughly recommend this book to teachers and researchers in this area.

This book is great for many reasons. It most notable feature is the breadth and depth of the topics - all of which are important in the modern enterprise. The examples have a substantial amount of "meat" which makes them useful as a starting point for other things. Some of the customized solutions can easily substitute for commercial products. Great Book.

This book's primary audience consists of SAP consultants and IT business systems analysts, and the ideal secondary audience should consist of business process owners in an R/3 environment, IT managers in all functional areas who are involved with developing, implementing and supporting supply chain and extended logistics solutions.

The theme is logistics management, using SAP, in an extended supply chain or a corporate hub and their vendors. There are three key sub themes in the book: (1) an explanation of the business benefits of extending buyer-seller systems in an extended supply chain (with an emphasis on using the Internet as the communications infrastructure), (2) specifics on how to accomplish this using SAP, and (3) evidence that it can be done.

I like the practical approach taken by the authors - instead of succumbing to the temptation to careen off into blue sky solutions, they stick with what can be done in the here and now. Although it's almost blasphemy to discuss EDI when everyone else seems to be hyping web services and other approaches and solutions that are relatively new, the authors show the strengths and weaknesses of this proven approach. They also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of XML, although ebXML is curiously missing. The reason its absence is so curious is that the EC appears to be wholeheartedly embracing it, and this book has a distinct European bias, especially in the chosen case studies.

More importantly, though, this book goes into the details SAP's internet components and how they relate to other modules that support logistics and supply chain management for an enterprise. The details go well beyond technology - this book gives equal treatment to business and technical issues, and that is one of the reasons why it's so valuable to the primary and secondary audiences I cited above. Although I thought ebXML should have been covered in depth, I found this book to be complete and to realistically cover the topic's key issues.

Solid, current book on architecture, data marts, OLAP, metadata and DBMS choices, with strong emphasis on Web and intranet development and emerging standards. Could have included more vendor material for ETL & OLAP tools. Good textbook and reference in a fast-changing field.

An excellent introduction to the world of Computer Networks.

This is no word for this book. It's touching, but still funny. The story teaches that the world is a better place with you than without you. Read this book when life isn't good, for it's very soothing. You will get a laugh too. This is a five star, two thumbs up book. That's why I highly recommend it!

Most books on distributed java cover only one aspect (eg. RMI) in a level of detail that is really booring and time consuming to follow. This book gives a good coverage of available distributed computing methods in java (eg. RMI, CORBA, Voyager, etc.). None of the methods are covered in great detail but they are covered well enough to understand them and to know what you need to search for information about if you do implement one of them. The real value of this book is that it provides a clear overview of what methods can be used in distributed java so that informed decisions can be made as to which one should be implemented in a project. The only downside I see to this book is that there are a number of gramatical mistakes. The mistakes don't make the book unreadable and can be overlooked because the author is European, and English probably was not his first language. This downside is relatively minor, and the author's English is overall very good. An editor should have been used to catch these mistakes.

Do not buy this book if you don't understand object oriented programming and are not an experienced programmer. If you don't understand how to program, this book will be a waste of your time.

For several years, Sun has promoted Jini as a means of developing Java-based distributed computing systems. As a practical matter, these systems are often mobile, and hence wireless. Think perhaps of the increasingly powerful and ubiquitous cellphones, PDAs and laptops. Less familiar to the public, but even more pervasive, are products using embedded microprocessors like cars and home appliances. Typically, most distributed systems have less memory and power than conventional computers, and their network connections may be intermittent. Developing applications to run under these conditions is tough, and Jini tries to make it practical. But in the last two years the pace of Jini development seems to have slowed. A rival open source approach, JXTA, has quickly grown and captured a lot of mindshare amongst developers. Its proponents say that it is far easier to learn and use. Naturally, Jini enthusiasts strongly disagree.

But for the sake of argument, suppose Jini is indeed more difficult to program. Then if you are Sun, it makes sense to develop useful utilities on top of Jini that simplify coding. JavaSpaces, for example. Which is the subject of this book. It is a Jini service (=utility) that can be easily used by other devices on the network. A JavaSpace holds data that can be read and altered in a transactional context. This means that if the set of operations in a transaction fails, it can be rolled back; a fundamental necessity in a distributed system, where things can fail in many ways. As the authors clearly demonstrate, you need know little Jini to understand and use JavaSpaces. The interface is very clean, having essentially only three operations: "write" - to put something into the space; "read" - to read an item from the space into your device; "take" - to read the item into your device and remove it from the space.

The book is short and succinct. The code examples are easy to grasp, without being simplistic. If you have been thinking about using Jini, or perhaps you already are using it, but are stymied, then try this book. In a day's reading, you can get its essence. A low risk investment of your time.

Suppose though that you are a JXTA programmer. Or maybe you are using some other third way to develop distributed applications. There is probably no analog of JavaSpaces in your environment. Consider investing a day of your time in this book. See if it makes sense of have something like this. If so, perhaps you should implement it?

If you are looking for a 1200 page book that details how to perform a network installation of Windows NT, how to configure your NT server to use WINS, and all the minutia about NT, then this is definitely not the book for you.

What is unique about "Looking Into Windows NT: A Before-You-Leap Guide to Microsoft's Network Solution", is that it is the only book (that I have yet to find) that deals with the Windows NT operating systems from a business viewpoint, as opposed to a technical viewpoint. It attempts to help you solve the $64,000 questions of the 90's: Should your company switch to Windows NT?

Non-technical staff will appreciate the book for its readable, jargon free (well, almost. Any jargon used is clearly explained) style. Technical staff will appreciate the book for its insights into the business case for NT that they likely have not seen.

While NT is definitely the hot and politically correct NOS today, (one could almost say that in 1998, no one would get fired for choosing NT), choosing NT for the right reasons is not always such an easy endeavor. While some information systems managers may simply dismiss NT as Microsoft's third attempt at the NOS market, the keen IS manager will know that NT is here to stay, and will use this book to justify or invalidate the use of NT within his company.

While systems administrators may appreciate NT from its ease of use and pretty GUI, the business case of how a business can benefit from NT is often an overlooked issue.

Looking Into Windows NT examines such business questions such as:

·What are the experiences of other companies using NT? ·What effect will NT have on your current applications? ·Which applications will run best on NT? ·Which applications won't run on NT? ·Can NT really add value to your business? ·What are NT's most popular features ·How does Microsoft itself use NT? ·How does one add NT to a Novell NetWare environment? What about Unix?

The book opens with the statement "Microsoft's products are pretty good, but their marketing and sales organization is even better". The difficulty that the business manager faces when evaluating NT is the task of breaking through Microsoft's marketing to see if the product at hands truly meets the companies needs. What this book gives the non-technical manager is the ability to see through the often hype involved with marketing and see if NT can truly support his business.

The book uses a real, major corporation (using a fictitious name though) as its case study. The chapters detail the companies network infrastructure, protocols used, remote needs and directory services requirements in place, and attempts to see if NT can help this company.

One important question that the company posed, and one that is crucial to most organizations is, what is the effect of NT on our current applications? While NT runs & is compatible with most 16-bit applications, there are large amounts that simply won't run under NT. This is an issue for companies that have a large amount of in-house written applications.

The book goes into depth about the domain architecture of Windows NT. It discussed the various domain models and servers & which specific model scales best to different type of companies. The book attempts to determine which is the best model for different types of companies; from large multi-national companies, to small single-office entities. What is interesting about the book is that it also specifies the particulars of how the Microsoft's internal domain is structured. By getting a view of how Microsoft names their domains and what type of arrangement they use, one can get a qualified description of large-scale NT operation.

NT offers a major new feature set. The book goes into detail about how innovations such as: the NT file system, distributed file systems, fault tolerance, RAID, hardware scalability can and will effect an organization.

The NetWare arena is where NT has made a significant amount if inroads, much to the chagrin of Novell. Even if a company decides to eliminate NetWare for NT, this shift must occur without a significant downtime to existing system. The book details the varied tools, methods and utilities that NT employs to make a NetWare to NTR migration successful.

The book comes in at 155 pages and can be read in a few hours. This book does not attempt to answer every question about NT, nor can it, but covers all of the rudiments. Can one book really provide you with all the answer to the question "Should we switch to NT"? No. Today's information systems are too large and complex for an off-the-shelf book to answer the question definitively. But if you are empowered to decided whether to switch to NT or stay with Banyan Vines, or need to see if the NT file system can support your business needs, get this book, then call Microsoft. Not the other way around.

If you are an afs sysadmin you can't afford not to have this incredible book. I'm surprised there are no other rave reviews here.Richard Campbell has done a tremendous job showing the reader what is going on under the hood of an afs system. He also mentions various little titbits you won't find anywhere in Transarc's documentation or webstite. The chapter on debuggin various problems will give you an procedural methodology on how to tackle certain problems. There is an enormous amount of info in this book. It's also worth mentioning that the publisher has done a wonderfull job on design and typesetting; very clean like one would expect from a serious technical book. Anyway what r u waiting for ?; click and buy, this is your new best friend ;)