Distributed Computing Books

After all, Bruyn & Ken's influx of new talent allows our entire IT community to prosper. "Becoming a SAP Consultant" has been a leading source for SAP in the metropolitan area for years. (Javaid Ansari Developer on Developer/2000)

The topic of becoming an SAP consultant has been so over-exploited in the past several years in newsgroups and chat rooms. Now, the authors have done the same thing in their book. The SAP market has shrunk tremendously in the past 12 mos. Launching yourself into the SAP world now is like closing the barn door after the horse is a mile down the road. On content, the book is filled with fluff. As other reviewers have pointed out, all the stuff in this book is freely available elsewhere. Pass on this one.

For anyone who has been in this business very long, you'll already know everything in here. Many pages are even wasted on re-printing information from FREE IRS publications. Why pay for that? The authors also left out some important stuff, like disability insurance and professional liability insurance.

This book is so incredibly contrived, I'm not sure where to begin. How about the part about recommending that a consultant learn to type fast, as it allows one to get more work done per minute and gives the impression that you are busy? In the end, it's just another thinly-veiled attempt by some self-appointed "experts" to cash in on the R/3 phenomenon. There are better books out there that provide a lot more knowledgeable insight on being an independent consultant; they might not be SAP-specific, but neither is a lot of this book's content--in spite of its title.

I read the reviews with regrets initially anticipating a good introduction to SAP consulting. Any recommendations?

What do you get when you rush a book to press?? A poorly written book for a very difficult test. I took the test and used this book for my first test on the MS 70-223 and I got burned. I then took the test after purchasing the Microsoft Training Kit and had no problems. I had a discussion with the author of the book by e-mail about my first failure. I then asked him two of the questions on the test that I did not understand. I got an answer back that pretty much said that he did not know the answer. Exam Crams are usually great. Do your self a favor and save the money for the Microsoft Training Kit. You will be better prepared for the test if you do.

This Exam Cram does not delve deep enough into the subject matter to get you through the Windows 2000 Clustering Exam (70-223). Make no mistake, the exam this book attempts to prepare the reader for is *hard* -- you need to score a 777 to pass it, you don't get nearly as much time as you typically do on an MS exam, and the questions are primarily related to troubleshooting scenarios that one would have had to encounter in practice to understand. Some hands-on experience in a support environment and/or thorough review of all Microsoft Knowledge Base articles on clustering may be more helpful than buzzing through this study guide which I found to be loaded with honest errors (they had some really obvious ones in the practice exams) and utter bogusness (most of the optimization techniques described in Chapter 11 is inapplicable in both the real world and on the test).

The only reason I am rating this book 2 stars instead of 1 is that I think it could be combined with some in-depth material from Microsoft support site for a successful study strategy.

I know what some of you are thinking -- "Exam Cram is usually right on, anyone who can't pass the test with an Exam Cram doesn't have a lot of experience or didn't really read the book". To that, I've passed plenty of Microsoft exams the first time with Exam Crams only (and some real-world experience); this is the first one I've ever failed, and I've been highly-engaged with clustering on W2K with Advanced Server for over a year! Please be advised that this book will not be enough to pass 70-223.

The Exam Cram series is always a gamble. Most of them are winners; this one is a sure loser.

The Exam Cram strength has always been to cover the material MS requires on test. The first few chapters provide a good introduction to clustering and then the book covers the appropriate topics. Just not in the proper depth or clarity needed to pass the test. Add to this shortcoming the constant misspellings and worthless pratices tests and you lose.

Maybe this book will work if you have experience with MS Clustering and you just need to fill one or two gaps.

It's a good book, but don't get me wrong, you need a lot of real word of experience in deploying and maintaining MS clusters. Know the hardware components, specially Fibre Channel and Scsi,also installing and configuring physical componentsand groups. So I suggest first to be familiar with this concepts, as well as the cluster.exe parameters commands and the GUI of Cluster administrator.

This book frustrated me. It had typos everywhere, improper grammer and incorrect code samples. That was my main problem with this. Although the author states that he's had many students review this over two years, he should've looked it over more than once. Maybe I should be a book editor with all of the errors I caught! I don't think this book should have been published in its current state... ESPECIALLY at $70 for a paperback. The organization of the book seemed choppy. I personally would have had RMI and CORBA back to back as competing remoting technologies, and then have the two Internet-related chapters together.

As for content: this book was good for learning basic network programming, RMI, CORBA, and Servlets. All through the book, the author makes numerous references to other RFCs and web sites for further details. This book was itself such an introductory text, I wonder why print it at all, if all of these sources are availalbe for free online (again, $70). For a book just published, it was disappointingly weak in the JSP and Web Service areas which are the major distributed computing technologies emerging today (for Java, at least)! The author also seemed ignorant of the web service basics (which might be why he said little about it) and just gave a description of a SOAP message (incorrectly on some points: an xml namespace is NOT simply the company name).

If this wasn't for a required class, I'd surely return it! If you want to learn how to do sockets and internet programming, my old "Java Network Programming" book by Hughes, Merlin, and Conrad was much better. If you want to do remoting technologies, there is an O'Reilly book on RMI. If you want to do web services get a book on that. To the publisher: if you pay me, I'll edit your books for you.

I'm sure I could go on more but I'll stop here. I'll say, "thumbs down." My two cents.

The overly priced book attempts to explain distributed computing. Unfortunately, Liu's grammar is so poor that the book is hard to understand at times. The book was written a while ago and a lot of it is outdated. I would not recommend this book.

I trusted the description on the back cover telling that I would know when to apply (or not) certain techniques on real-life, enterprise cases, but when I purchased it, and unwrap the plastic cover, I found a lot ot chapters with basics, as installing the JDK, and basics on Java. Gives sneaks into all main issues (JDBC, Threads, etc), but it's not worth the money I paid for it. Not for "IS professionals" but a piece for fast-learners, although newbies.

Although I didn't read the whole book in depth, I've at least scanned most of it, and - frankly - I was disppointed. The book is more for the beginner than for the experienced programmer. And for the beginner (and the experienced programmer too) I've found other books (e.g. Eckel's excellent "Thinking in Java") to be both more detailed AND easier reading. In short - it's not that this book is bad - just that others are much better.

Because I was going to have little time behind the console of an Exchange 2000 server while preparing for my exam, I opted for this eTrainer. I must admit that I am very disappointed with it.

If you just want to gain a basic overall knowledge of the product, it's fine. And, if you won't have access to an Exchange 2000 server, the interactive exercises will help familiarize you with the Exchange interface. But this is marketed as a comprehensive exam prep tool and, in that respect, I believe it fails. In my opinion, this product WILL NOT prepare you for the Microsoft exam. I firmly believe that if I had relied on this tool alone, I would not have come close to passing the exam.

The course spends a lot of time on areas that are only lightly covered by the actual exam, and it glosses over some real key areas that were heavily covered on the exam (e.g. backup and restore).

Throughout the course of using the eTrainer, I found numerous errors. The testing engine is a joke. Most of its 500 questions tend to be of a simple multiple choice or fill in the blanks nature. The Microsoft exam uses all complex scenario-based questions of a far more difficult nature than you what will see with the eTrainer. Some of the answers to the questions were just plain wrong (e.g. open port 993 on a fire wall for secure POP3). There was another case where the explanation provided for an answer was a direct contradiction to the answer itself. Gosh, you'd think a respectable publisher like Sybex would have put a little more effort into proof reading this.

All in all I came away with the sense that this product represents a poor execution of a good idea. In the past, I've used numerous Sybex exam prep books and usually found them to be excellent. In fact, I used James Chellis' Exchange 5.5 book for that certification. I'm a little surprised that he put his name on this one.

One more point; the description provided by Amazon.com states that the CD includes a searchable PDF of the Sybex Exchange 2000 Adminstration book. I did not find this on my CD, and there is no mention of it on the retail packaging or on Sybex's website. I think this is an error.

In summation, if you're looking for a quick way to get some Exchange 2000 knowledge, this will be fine. If you're looking for a tool to help you pass the test, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Somehow, this book came across as too narrow and too broad, both at the same time.

Too narrow, in that each chapter was a very detailed study of a specific implementation or idea. The first few chapters, for example, presented particular extensions to the Haskell programming langauge, intended to support parallel programming. Lord knows that parallel systems need all the help they can get. If hard-core functional programming is the answer, though, I'm not sure I heard the question. Functional programmers have been beating their drum for at least 30 years, and still have little effect on the main parade of software development.

What they call "skeletons" seem to be fairly ordinary constructs for parallelism, including co-begin and pipelining. I have trouble getting excited about seeing them presented in obscure notation. I would also have hoped to see more demanding kinds of applications. Ray-tracing was a common one, but ray-tracing is "embarassingly parallel." It's almost hard not to get a parallel speedup approaching 1:1 with the number of processors.

The remainder of the book operates at a very different level. Instead of specific syntax in a specific language, it presents a number of design patterns at a very high conceptual level. Instead of particular implementations on specific processors, it discusses techniques that can be applied across loosely-coupled, web-based ensembles. The design pattern discussion was adequate, but seemed an odd mate for the low-level detail of the book's first section.

Even though I work every day with highly parallel computation, I just didn't come away with much I could use. I found this book frankly disappointing.

I read through this book and learned a few things, but it is not an in-depth step-by-step guide. It seems to be aimed at amateurs or IS people who are clueless about database-driven Web sites, which is possible since IT is a wide field.

If you truly want a step-by step guide and you're going to use Microsoft products/technologies, you definitely have to check out 'Web Database Development Step by Step.' This is your step-by-step guide! It is a cookbook with excellent insight. There truly aren't many guide books covering Web DB development, and that MS Press book is a gem.

This book is an introductory overview for the non-professional. Far from living up to its cover copy, the book seems to be aimed at individuals or amateurs who, for example, want to present their collections of antique baseball cards online. It includes whole sections, for example, covering Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro while coverage of Oracle, DB2, or SQL server is handled by a couple of paragraphs. I seriously doubt if any IS professional will find this book "to be an invaluable step-by-step guide" as claimed on the cover.

This book does a poor job of summarizing the actual framework. Probably because Tivoli continues to change the product to keep in the running with its competitors.

As a new Tivoli Administrator, I thought that this book (copyright 1998) would give me a good overview of the product. Unfortunately, the product is a moving target, with frequent updates and patches. Major architecture changes are in the works, with a new version of TME 10 due out in Sept. '98. Unless updated, this book will not be the least bit useful then.

Definitely not on a par with other books out there

I found this book didn't really provide me with the know how Ineeded to use the Netscape ONE technologies. a much better book is theNetscape ONE Developers Guide

This book is not helpful to even the beginning SAP security administrator. It lacks technical information and does not include enough depth in any area to be of assistance.

I recently purchased this book and returned it the next day. I was very disappointed in the lack of technical detail. Several areas were focused on Germany regulations and not appropriate for the US.