Distributed Computing Books

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.

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.

CompTIA's latest certification Server+ is fastly becoming a measuring stick for server technicians. The exam is vendor neutral and the amount if information is vast but with books like this one there is a good chance of passing the exam first time around.

I like the fact that there are over 30 hands-on exercises to work with. The fact that book is laid out according to the exam objectives and that each objective is given ample coverage. Topics like installation and planning of the server, hardware like the BIOS, hard drives, motherboards and RAID with mirroring and duplexing.

Windows 2000 and Netware 5.1 are covered as is adding hardware and upgrading equipment. Other areas with coverage include SNMP, UPS, baseline setup and monitoring, backup systems and schemes, troubleshooting and disaster recovery procedures.

The book includes a self test and end-of-chapter review questions. Finally there is a cd rom included with CertTrainer, which has over 200 practice test questions, the e-book and Exam Sim. Overall a nice value.

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.

The publisher seems to have come up with their own version of the CompTIA Server+ exam objectives. The exam objectives in this book certainly do not match the Server+ exam objectives that are published by CompTIA. Of the six names listed in the book, none of the four contributors (authors) are Server+ certified (although they all have other certifications), the technical editor is Server+ certified, the Technical reviewer is not. This lack of certification on Server+ shows, as the book contains many errors and is very light on both SCSI and RAID, both of which are big areas on concern on the Server+ exam.

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.

No real setup. An abundance of file loading errors. License Agreement Error keeps comin up. Sample Code doesn't have enough error handling. Sloppy Sloppy work......To the authors, Get a CLUE. Learn how to use install shield if you're going to include a CD in your book!! Compile your code on something other than a beta version of vb 5.0! This book was a horrible waste of my time and money. Garbage..........

I purposely bought this book for its extensive discussion of RDO processing. But when I began to read through it it bacame apparent that the author was either ignorant of, or wrote before, the new RDO structure under version 5. The RDO 'PreparedStatement' layer has been replaced in Version 5 by the newer 'RDO Query' layer and yet there was no mention of this in the book. I returned it immediately because I felt that if such an important point was missed for this subject that other subjects could be errant as well

I purchased this book and Ted Harwood's "Inside Citrix Metaframe XP" when I needed to design and roll out a 3-server farm of Metaframe XP FR3. This book rarely ever got used. I found it to be poorly organized, and frustrating to use. Answers and information were much easier to find in the Harwood book and on the Citrix support website.

The book description says that it comes with a CD-ROM, but mine sure didn't. No mention of it anywhere.

Other than that, the book is not stellar, but OK. It tends to repeat itself at times as is common in books written by multiple authors.

Generally, I am very happy with Syngress books, but not this one. First of all, the writing style is very difficult to follow at times.. It's kind of hard to explain but it's almost like the authors are trying to find the most confusing way to explain things.

I was also dissapointed to read so much of the same stuff that is available directly in the Citrix manuals (albeit the Citrix literature is much more clear). The funny thing is there is a ... editorial review that says that this book actually explains what all the heading do in the CMC. Well guess what? SO DOES THE MANUAL!! (Except the manual is free, not... like this book.) Of course I noticed this review after I bought the book.

I'm kind of new to Citrix, but even I found an error (this book says that MS License Servers must run on a domain controller--but that's not true because ours aren't). I know that mistakes are common in tech books, but now I kind of wonder what else is wrong with it.

Overall, the book does seem to cover a lot of areas, but there's a lot to read through to get to anything useful.

I have been working with Citrix products for a few years now and my company has recently decided to migrate to MF XP. Having little experience with the product i turned to books. Syngress always delivered for me and i found this book published by them.

I am extremely happy with the content in the book, covered everything i needed to know and more. This book has been invaluable in my migration form MF 1.8 to XP.

I most definately recommednt his book....

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.

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.

everything you need to start developing services and clients and nothing unnecessary.

clear, concise explanations, better than those in the Professional Jini book.

sample programs/code needs better formatting for better readablility though

I agree with the reviewer from Wyoming. This book is poorly written (at least it is in englist). The code examples have errors and typos in them that leave you debugging the code examples to try to figure out the what point the writer was trying to make. The German version may be good, but I would not recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn SAP.

This book give you a whole picture for software development of abap programming. For detail, online help should be consulted.

at times the book seems as if it was taken directly from a german to english translator program and published. there are sections that are nearly impossible to read without a couple of passes. i had hoped to use this as a text for abap training, but it is somewhat confusing to follow, and offers very little detail beyond what can be taken from abap on-line help. there are bright points, such as some of the dialog programming discussion, but overall, i think there are better development books available.

The usual ABAP book is about 850 pages long. This one is a meagre 320 or so. This book is very good. It packs a lot of information into its 320 pages, whereas the other ABAP books get off on tangents, or add lots of stuff you really don't need.

I did not really understand this book until I read Ken Greenwood's "ABAP in 21 Days" - which I would highly recommend. But after Greenwood, this book is a "walk in the park", and is really detailed and clear (despite a few minor translation issues).

I haven't actually read this one, but I've read many, many other things the author has written, and they were great, so how bad could it be?

This is a really good book for administrators. It covers all the nitty-gritty in configuring the WLS Server - and all the different options such as clustering, security, failover, etc.

It absolutely does not talk about development. So if you are a pure developer then don't buy the book, because you will not benefit much.

I give it 3 stars only, because I think it is good, but not perfect. There are better ways to explain tough concepts such as clustering.

I preordered this book believing the editorial note "Scott Hawkins starts where the documentation leaves.." What a bunch of bs. This book is really bad. I doesn't give anything useful that is not in the excellent WebLogic docs. Don't waste your money in this book. Many issues are cover with WebLogic v6.1. And clearly he used a v7 beta.
I'll stick to the WebLogic docs and forums.

I got this book because I have been a fan of Garg's Elements of Distributed Computing ever since I first read it. Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java seems to be really great buy. It has a very strong theoretical foundation, but the emphasis seems to be on writing distributed programs and getting them to work. If you are a theory lover I wouldnt recommend ths book, but if you like implementing stuff then you will definitely like this book. The range of topics covered is quite comprehensive given the size of the book.

I bought this book a couple of years ago now. Although it has some interesting discussion of distributed algorithms its big let-down is the abysmal Java code that it contains. I cannot believe for one moment that any of this compiles, let alone works - it all generally looks like pseduo-code written for the purposes of illustration rather being of any practical value.

Likewise I didn't find the material particularly helpfully structured or consistent in its level of detail. I would have liked to see more quantitive analysis of the suitability of different algorithms in practical applications and broader coverage of well-known distributed algorithms (for instance paxos and virtual synchrony are conspicuous in their absence).

I bought this book because I was interested in implementing
distributed algorithms. It has a good overview of the fundamental
algorithms and I found it helpful to see actual code. It's the only
book I know of that actually provides implementations rather than
pseudo code.

On the other hand, the algorithm descriptions were often condensed, and I
expected a more formal approach. I often found myself reading eagerly
to learn about an interesting variant of an algorithm only to find a
reference to a journal paper. It would be useful to cover a few more
variants more deeply.

Also, I was hoping to get an idea of an algorithm's usefulness and
performance in practice. Or is a particular algorithm more of
theoretical interest? The answer was not clear to me, although in
fairness, this was not the author's main purpose.

I studied this book in my IT master program as a textbook for operating system course. It was easy to follow, clear, and simple. Some of other students who study some course but with another textbook they take it from me to its simply. Rich and small size easy to cary any where
i recommende it ..

First off, there is no such thing as "The interface between the application programs and a high level language...". They might as well have said "The interface between red construction bricks and red clay..." Those things are not distinct entities. One is made of the other. Bricks are made of clay which is shaped by a mold. Application programs are made of bits and pieces of a high level language (that is, the keywords, operators and other syntax elements that the high level language defines) which are "shaped" into the desired form by the source code that the programmer writes. They got the relationship between application programs and languages completely wrong.

At first I thought: OK, maybe these guys are just hardware types who are a little out of their element when it comes to software. That would be somewhat forgivable. Was that the case? Nope.

They proceeded to get wrong something so simple and obvious, that I wonder if any fact checking at all was done on this book. They cited the PowerPC chip as being a CISC processor, when it is actually a RISC processor. Also, they referred to it as "...the IBM and Macintosh PowerPC." The problem? Macintosh does not make the PowerPC chip, it uses it. Nevermind the fact that Macintosh is the name of a product, not of a company. It is IBM and Freescale Semiconductor (formerly known as Motorola's semiconductor division) that make the PowerPC processor chips. This is such basic stuff that even an intern fact checker/proofreader could spot it easily.

After such glaringly obvious errors -- less than 5 pages into the first chapter! -- I have no confidence at all in the ability of the authors to present the complex and sophisticated art of modern computer architecture in an accurate manner.

I am not going to waste any more of my time on this book.

I was hoping to find an alternative to Patterson et al.'s "Computer Organization and Design" -- mainly to get away from their constant and not-very-subtle "MIPS is better than x86" diatribe.

This book loses one star for bad editing.

It loses another star for being (in places) just plain wrong about details. The authors seem to do fine with "big picture" generalizations, but when it comes to the particulars -- watch out! This problem seems most obvious when they try to talk about the features of real-world CPUs, such as the x86 family. For example, they made a couple statements about Pentium memory management that left me wondering if they had ever read the Intel documentation. In general, their real-world examples seemed to be something that they stuck into the book in order to make it "more relevant."

So, I guess it's back to Patterson, et al.

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

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.

I think this is a great book for experienced Java developers who are getting started with J2EE but would not recommend it if you don't already have a fair amount of Java programming experience (you should probably wait for a "Dummies" book on J2EE or some book like that if you are not good at Java already). I liked the no-nonsense approach to the J2EE 1.4 platform that this book takes since I did not need a lot of help on basic Java concepts, only J2EE, and I really like all of the online resources that come with each chapter since I can followup on topics that I want more details about. Almost every chapter had half a donzen or more extra online resources which is more than I'll probably ever have time to read but its nice to have them anyway.

Before reading this book I used mainly Java servlets and JSPs but didn't really understand how these technologies fit into the J2EE "platform" even though I bought a few other J2EE books for this. Now that the work I'm doing on the server side is more complex I had to come up to speed on the J2EE "platform" fast and also had to learn what the pros/cons of J2EE 1.4 are and this is the book I have been waiting for. I had bought Sun's J2EE Tutorial thinking it was "from the source" and would be what I needed but it was no good other than to get you familiar with Sun's own J2EE tools (so no good for me). In comparison J2EE 1.4 Essentials gives a wider view of the J2EE platform and also is excellent at showing what's important and new with 1.4 (it is is not a step by step "how to" book like the tutorial... it is overview perfect for learning about the J2EE platform and 1.4 features so I highly recommend it for this). I am also impressed that this book covers version 1.4 since I thought I would have to wait for a long time to get a good overvew book on J2EE 1.4.

I only wish this book had a companion volume of related sub-books so that I could get more coverage of each topic in print (bound hard copy) but the extra online chapters and materials do a good job if you don't mind reading them online or printing yourself. I would highly recommend this book to Java developers who need to get started with J2EE or who need to get a well rounded understanding of the platform in general with an eye on what's really important with J2EE 1.4.

J2EE 1.4 Essentials by Aaron E Walsh gives a very high level overview of the entire J2EE platform. First of all, let me explain what this book does and what it doesn't do. This book does provide a very high level overview of the wide spectrum of technologies involved in the J2EE platform. However, it doesn't go into depth in any of them. As a developer, I felt I was given just enough information to get me interested, but not enough information to accomplish anything. In addition, I found that the writing was remarkably accurate, albeit quite dry in style. Coupled with the amazing number of acronyms used to describe the various technologies involved, the writing style doesn't lend itself to easy reading. In fact, I found that I needed to be fairly familiar with the technologies or I'd end up rereading large sections. As this book is to be an introduction to J2EE technologies, the excessive use of acronyms is very awkward. Some of the redeeming qualities of the book, however, include accuracy of content and very few editing errors. Also, throughout the book, there are a great number of references to web sites for more information and even extra material available via the Internet. All in all, if you're looking for a brief overview of J2EE technologies, this book isn't bad, but if you're looking to do something with J2EE, you'll probably find yourself looking for another book soon.