Distributed Computing Books

This book is subtitled as "An all-inclusive survey of the fundamentals of parallel and distributed computing." It both succeeds and fails on this point. Leopold does indeed cover a wide expanse of technologies and approaches that characterize the space of high performance computing. It is in many ways still an emerging space, so conclusively nailing down every possible thread (no pun intended) in a coherent fashion is eminently difficult. The author's treatment of these different possibilities is uneven, overlooking some important contemporary technologies and implementations. It does cover a wide range of topics within the fields of distributed and parallel computing. Furthermore, within the chapters Leopold treats us to both high-level discussions of approaches and provides a glimpse into some of the implementation challenges involved. On the latter point especially, this book is very useful in that it gives the noninitiate some understanding and appreciation of the peculiarities of parallel programming, without requiring substantial technical background in the technologies. The examples in High Performance C and Parallel Fortran were very enlightening.

Where the book fails is that it is far from "all inclusive". There are a number of prominent and important developments that have not been included. Similarly, there are other interesting newer technologies that have only received cursory treatment. Examples include:

- No mention of SETI@Home. SETI@Home is the poster child of massively distributed computing, and with 15 teraflops of raw computing power, it is more capable than IBM's ASCI White supercomputer.
- No mention of distributed.net, or other notable exercises in public and commercial grid computing.
- Grid computing gets only a glancing reference at the tail end of one chapter. A comparative analysis of this important and still-forming space is glaringly absent from this text.
- JavaSpaces, Sun's answer to tuple-spaces, gets only a few sentences.
- Java RMI similarly gets less than a paragraph.
- Although DCOM is now basically legacy for Microsoft, it represents an important milestone in the evolution of distributed computing. It receives only a paragraph.
- Talk of web services and .Net would have been hitting the airwaves as the writing of this book as progressing, although possibly late in the effort. However, some cursory mention at least should have been made. There is increasing discussion of exposing grid compute services via web services interfaces, and Microsoft has recently announced their intention to port the Globus toolkit to Windows.
- Oh yeah, about Globus. Barely a mention.

It was clear from the text that the author came from a strong UNIX and CORBA background. The text has the feel of a PhD thesis-turned-book, and the areas of concentration are decidedly academic. There are a few other areas of minor complaint. Some of the wording in the text is clumsy, reflecting inadequate editing. Some topics feel like they are introduced in reverse order, assuming the reader already has some context about the given topic.

The author makes a sometimes-clumsy distinction between paradigms and models. The distinction is important in that an understanding of models brings a reader closer to envisioning how they might tackle a given problem themselves. However, reference to various models are sprinkled throughout the book. A comparative analysis, even brief, would have been very useful had it been centralized.

Those complaints may sound harsh, but overall the book is useful. It demystifies the problems of parallel programming, and provides a reasonably concise starting point for researching the distributed computing space. But, consider this book a starting point, and not an ending point.

This book is subtitled as "An all-inclusive survey of the fundamentals of parallel and distributed computing." It both succeeds and fails on this point. Leopold does indeed cover a wide expanse of technologies and approaches that characterize the space of high performance computing. It is in many ways still an emerging space, so conclusively nailing down every possible thread (no pun intended) in a coherent fashion is eminently difficult. The author's treatment of these different possibilities is uneven, overlooking some important contemporary technologies and implementations. It does cover a wide range of topics within the fields of distributed and parallel computing. Furthermore, within the chapters Leopold treats us to both high-level discussions of approaches and provides a glimpse into some of the implementation challenges involved. On the latter point especially, this book is very useful in that it gives the noninitiate some understanding and appreciation of the peculiarities of parallel programming, without requiring substantial technical background in the technologies. The examples in High Performance C and Parallel Fortran were very enlightening.

Where the book fails is that it is far from "all inclusive". There are a number of prominent and important developments that have not been included. Similarly, there are other interesting newer technologies that have only received cursory treatment. Examples include:

- No mention of SETI@Home. SETI@Home is the poster child of massively distributed computing, and with 15 teraflops of raw computing power, it is more capable than IBM's ASCI White supercomputer.
- No mention of distributed.net, or other notable exercises in public and commercial grid computing.
- Grid computing gets only a glancing reference at the tail end of one chapter. A comparative analysis of this important and still-forming space is glaringly absent from this text.
- JavaSpaces, Sun's answer to tuple-spaces, gets only a few sentences.
- Java RMI similarly gets less than a paragraph.
- Although DCOM is now basically legacy for Microsoft, it represents an important milestone in the evolution of distributed computing. It receives only a paragraph.
- Talk of web services and .Net would have been hitting the airwaves as the writing of this book as progressing, although possibly late in the effort. However, some cursory mention at least should have been made. There is increasing discussion of exposing grid compute services via web services interfaces, and Microsoft has recently announced their intention to port the Globus toolkit to Windows.
- Oh yeah, about Globus. Barely a mention.

It was clear from the text that the author came from a strong UNIX and CORBA background. The text has the feel of a PhD thesis-turned-book, and the areas of concentration are decidedly academic. There are a few other areas of minor complaint. Some of the wording in the text is clumsy, reflecting inadequate editing. Some topics feel like they are introduced in reverse order, assuming the reader already has some context about the given topic.

The author makes a sometimes-clumsy distinction between paradigms and models. The distinction is important in that an understanding of models brings a reader closer to envisioning how they might tackle a given problem themselves. However, reference to various models are sprinkled throughout the book. A comparative analysis, even brief, would have been very useful had it been centralized.

Those complaints may sound harsh, but overall the book is useful. It demystifies the problems of parallel programming, and provides a reasonably concise starting point for researching the distributed computing space. But, consider this book a starting point, and not an ending point.

As with a most technical books, this one leaves a lot to be desired. To begin with, the authors assume the reader all ready posesses some knowledge or resource about Powerbuilder. The chapter on scripts is badly deficient as are the chapters on data windows. These are terrible deficiences since these two areas are where Powerbuilder developers spend lots of time. Explanations of how different features are blended into a single application are non-existant. Examples are non-existant and the instructions for the exercises are confusing and often incorrect.

The overeview chapters are the best that I've seen within an introductory PowerBuilder book. The chapters having to do with the Powerscript language are not as good as the overview chapters.

Overeall, a very good book for the beginning PowerBuilder programmer

My context is as a student researching Thin Client computers. When I started my dissertation last year, the books on Thin Clients were extremely limited. This book provides a great overview of a variety of software technologies and their use in inter-, intra- and extra-nets. The flow of this book is a bit awkward, but the content is good for someone who understands a bit about the subject and wants to know more.

I thought that this book was very difficult to understand. While titled "Thin Clients", the book is really an overview of web enabled systems (intra and inter and extra nets). However, the author does not really explain how and why the new architecture differs from previous architectures. The book is very poorly integrated. I never really understood what the main point was. Also, it's very poorly written and very difficult to understand. While I am not a programmer, I have read other technical articles on this subject that are much clearer and to the point.I don't know who the audience for this book is. It's not technical enough to be of use to a developer and it's not succinct enough to be of use to a business person. It's a really bad book.

Still no breakthroughs. The book's collection of research papers is of good quality. The topics span automatic speech recognition, neural networks, expert systems and other AI topics. What is qualitatively new, compared to a decade earlier, is the inclusion of papers on Internet/Web applications.

The overall impression is one of incremental advances. The applications described by the papers are worthy, and complex. B But there still appears to be no fundamental advance in what might be considered to be true AI.

This book is a very academic one about the technologies, concepts, and tools necessary for the design and use of distributed content-based multimedia systems. SQL/MM is an international standards effort to extend SQL to support multimedia applications, including access and manipulation of geographic data. MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are, respectively, about the indexing/retrieval and distribution of multimedia objects. This book focuses on combining these standard technologies to produce functional and scalable distributed multimedia databases.
Chapter one introduces and focuses on the principles of multimedia data and metadata. Chapter 2 is dedicated to MPEG-7 supported with high-level examples of its use. Likewise, Chapter 3 introduces MPEG-21 and gives high-level examples of its use. From MPEG-7 comes the description of modern multimedia database management systems in chapter 4. Similarly, from MPEG-21 and multimedia databases come the concept of the distributed multimedia systems dealt with in chapter 5. Chapter 6 concludes the book and gives a final global view of a distribution system using these technologies.
This book discusses these technologies at a very high level, since almost none of the concepts discussed in this book have yet been implemented. Currently, it really is the only published work on the subject of distributed multimedia databases and the MPEG technologies, and it is well-written and clear even if somewhat dry. It has an excellent bibliography and references a multitude of web addresses where more information can be found. I would recommend it if you are doing research on the subject, but not if you are looking for practical solutions and examples, since none yet exist.

I read this book because I have to take this cause.

I find this book is pretty good, but only for beginners.

This is quite an interesiting and thourough book. Although I really don't understand the stupidity of it's price since I bought it for 60 Euro in Portugal... Really, You can get all the information in this book for much less than this absurd price....

This book is one of the first for Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server. The author does a very good job in reviewing the small details but somewhat misses the "big picture" for the non technical small business owner who wants knowledge enough to see the installation and configuration requirements, and perhaps install it himself. The book oscillates between step by step operations for the non technical and the very technical items are some what generalized. This is a little confusing to both types of readers. I was very suprised at the content of NT4.0 sections (very well done with excellent NT4.0 information) that did not reference the reader to how or if they are important to BackOffice Small Business Server. However, there is excellent coverage of potential trouble spots that will save the more technical installer many headaches. Not a book for the small business owner or the non-computer experienced installer. Written before the 4.0a upgrade Service ! release. Easy read and good style.

I am intresting in Protocol Engineering . I want to buy this
book but I don't know how to pay in china

this is a good book for small business startup. It goes from defining a server to managing the server and includes everythign between that period. From trends to comparisons of operating systems. It also talks about scalability and has 2 troubleshooting chapters which are pretty helpful. Again it is best for small start up business rather than an individual.