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Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Doesn't really tell you anything you don't already know. Seems very outdated also.
Rating: 
Summary: In-depth contents with real-life examples
Review: I've been dealing with Linux clustering for a while. I found the basic and difficult concepts are well explained and useful for newbies and more experienced. The book makes you want to read more with interesting, practical sample codes. The author is very knowledgeble and hits a nail right on the head.Although, some topics seem outdated, the underlying concepts holds through time. You're gonna enjoy tuning and adjusting it to fit your system environment. There is no abusolte solution for every system. As long as you understand what the book explains and many useful examples, you'll never get lost with lastest technologies and be equied with some solutions in mind. The rest is up to you to work on your cluster piece by piece. That's the beaty of clustering. I love the sections of Distributed Server Process in action, external performance measurement and analysis - estimating and displaying network utilization, inter-process commincation - messaging and more. I think most information in this book could not be found anywhere, even on the web.
Rating:
Summary: In-depth contents with real-life examples
Review: I've been dealing with Linux clustering for a while. I found the basic and difficult concepts are well explained and useful for newbies and more experienced. The book makes you want to read more with interesting, practical sample codes. The author is very knowledgeble and hits a nail right on the head. Although, some topics seem outdated, the underlying concepts holds through time. You're gonna enjoy tuning and adjusting it to fit your system environment. There is no abusolte solution for every system. As long as you understand what the book explains and many useful examples, you'll never get lost with lastest technologies and be equied with some solutions in mind. The rest is up to you to work on your cluster piece by piece. That's the beaty of clustering. I love the sections of Distributed Server Process in action, external performance measurement and analysis - estimating and displaying network utilization, inter-process commincation - messaging and more. I think most information in this book could not be found anywhere, even on the web.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive!
Review: This book shows how to assemble and configure several PCs into a network, how to configure Linux so each machine recognizes the others. It has example C programs showing how to do subtasking, and how these processes can communicate using shared memory, or sockets. The simple examples are expanded, showing how to set up a service that starts on a remote machine when I send a message to its registered port. There are details on how to send queries to the cluster server using different statistical distributions, and on how to monitor and display their response times. There is complete system-wide performance monitoring software, based on the /proc pseudo-file statistics. Each node machine is displayed on a separate monitor node that shows CPU and Memory use, disk and network I/O, etc. This book is complete: I don't have to install any third-party software like PVM or MPI. And I can customize the example system because I can download all the source code form the publisher's web site.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: This book was a let-down from what was expected. It was a book only really explaining the basic theory. Most of which a competant sysadmin knows already - Large arrows pointing out what an RJ45 port looks like on a computer for example. This was contrasted by the fact that over 1/8th of the book is C sourcecode. The technology discussed, both hardware and software seems out of date: does anyone still use a liunx 2.0.30 kernel? Overall, the book was far too superficial and lacking in practical aspects of building a cluster and the availability of any software out there to help you.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This is the first book I have found that actually tells you how to build up your cluster. Yes, it is technical. But it actually talks about everyman-hardware not just the high-end unobtainable. I came at this project from a power-user perspective in the *nix world. I can build up a Novell or MS network in a snap but some of the *nix topics are new to me, like shared memory across the network. When I built up my cluster I ran into a few problems. I contacted the published and within a couple of days Alex wrote back. Together we spent the next 3 weeks emailing back and forth. I would make a change, reinstall the OS, etc. Alex hung in there and helped me get everything running. That was a first for me, an author that actually cares.
Rating:
Summary: An author who actually cares!
Review: This is the first book I have found that actually tells you how to build up your cluster. Yes, it is technical. But it actually talks about everyman-hardware not just the high-end unobtainable. I came at this project from a power-user perspective in the *nix world. I can build up a Novell or MS network in a snap but some of the *nix topics are new to me, like shared memory across the network. When I built up my cluster I ran into a few problems. I contacted the published and within a couple of days Alex wrote back. Together we spent the next 3 weeks emailing back and forth. I would make a change, reinstall the OS, etc. Alex hung in there and helped me get everything running. That was a first for me, an author that actually cares.
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