Rating: 
Summary: Lacks depth
Review: Book does not convey information in a concise way. Quite voluminous book with no depth. Definitely not a good book for any level of programmers.
Rating:
Summary: OMG PDF are by far easier and more useful (enough said)
Review: Examples are decent but the one provided by the ORBs in the included CD are helluvalot better. If you are looking for more than a first dive into the topic this is light-years away from any in-depth analysis. Fundamental topics such as the POA are just described in a couple of pages. Furthermore, even for beginners this is not a good book. In fact beginners will find themselves in dire straits in many places where the author introduces new interfaces without not just a definition but not even a one word description.
Rating:
Summary: If you have nothing to say - write a stupid book
Review: I was really raging that I bought this book. Full of buzzwords, whithout any deeper knowledge. There are a lot of very good CORBA books, but this is no one. This one is only ga ga.
Rating:
Summary: Dont buy this book
Review: I've read reviews here but was stupid enough to buy it anyway. Well, I can blame only myself now. This book desn't help at all. For example there is almost no information about basic CORBA concept, IDL, and CORBA data types, just brief description without any detailed specification. I don't know who could be target auditory for this book: if you are looking for some basic overview of CORBA, this book is written in such a language, that it is difficult to understand what author trying to say; if you need reference or programming guide, there is none.
Rating: 
Summary: Jon Siegel introduces CORBA 3 Fundamentals and Programming
Review: My dozen co-authors and I are pleased with the comprehensive way CORBA 3 Fundamentals and Programming presents all of CORBA - not just the new parts, and not just the technical details. The new specifications, grouped under the umbrella term CORBA 3, are all presented in their logical position in the book and not added as appendeces. Here's a summary of the book:The first two chapters introduce object-oriented distributed computing and CORBA in an intentionally non-technical fashion. Non-technical management will benefit from reading these chapters, but will find that technical details start at the very beginning of Chapter 3 on OMG IDL. Chapters 3 through 9 present CORBA, starting with OMG IDL (since all of the ORB interfaces are defined in OMG IDL) and continuing with the ORB including the POA and CORBA Component Model, the standard protocol IIOP and its new asynchronous and Quality-of-Service extensions and realtime CORBA. Chapters 10 through 20 present the CORBAservices, CORBAfacilities, and CORBAdomains. Chapter 10, "Designing with the CORBAservices", is an overview patterns and benefits of using standard services in your enterprise's distributed object architecture; chapters 11 through 20 present the services and facilities including the domain specifications which are presented in summary (Chapter 19) and, for the Person Identification Service or PIDS and the Workflow Facility as examples for the rest, in detail in Chapter 20. Chapter 21, written by UML specification co-author and UML RTF chair Cris Kobryn, covers the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Chapter 22, written by MOF specification principal author Sridhar Iyengar (former co-chair of OMG's Analysis and Design Task Force and now sitting on OMG's Architecture Board), covers the Meta-Object Facility. Chapters 23 through 36 present a programming example. Worked in this edition in C++, Java, and COBOL, the example has been modified only slightly from the first edition where it was worked in C, C++, and Smalltalk: the example's IDL has been revised to conform to OMG's IDL Style Guide by co-author Dan Frantz who, BTW, wrote the style guide itself. Presented in a style that sets an example for enterprise application development, the book first presents the problem statement, follows with an analysis and design, uses this as the basis for IDL coding, and finishes with implementation. The example uses a retail scenario with about ten object types running in three processes (which would use three or more computers in a realistic implementation although you can run the demo on a single machine): a warehouse or depot, a store computer, and any number of Point-of-Sale stations, each with its own computer. Maximizing standard common code and minimizing adaptations for individual ORB products, the book works the example on eleven ORBs: five each in Java and C++, and one in COBOL. C++ and Java sections work both BOA and POA versions. (Why COBOL? Half of the world's programs are in COBOL. CORBA supports COBOL, but no one ever writes about it, and we figured it was time for that to change. Many thanks to Dave Gamble, Technical Architect for Merant and chair of OMG's ORBOS Task Force, for coding and writing up the COBOL version of the example.) The book's CD-ROM contains the complete example including IDL, source code, and makefiles for all eleven ORBs discussed in the book, plus generic versions of both C++ and Java source trees for both BOA and POA. Companies have contributed evaluation versions of seven ORBs. Virtually all of the OMG specifications appear on the CD as well: All of CORBA 2.3, the submissions that comprise CORBA 3, the CORBAservices, the domain facilities, UML 1.3, MOF 1.3, and XMI. We've even squeezed in a copy of Adobe's Acrobat reader, in case you don't have it yet. You'll need it to read the specifications, which are in pdf format.
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth the wait, and the price!
Review: One of the difficulties when reading specifications is that one never quite knows what the reasons were for designing the standards in the way that they are. And all too often, outsiders writing books on such matters simply regurgitate the contents of the standards. This is not something that you will find with Jon Siegel's book on CORBA, as he is an insider to the whole OMG scene, and what is more, his collaborators are all the principal authors of the standards in the areas that they cover. Under Jon's gentle but firm hand, they have all produced a book, which, together with the recent Vinoski and Henning tome, should be the two books that you have by your bedside, to be dipped into every night before you say your prayers and go to sleep. (If I have one complaint, what is this recent trend that makes publishers produce thick books with soft covers? It is most difficult to balance on one's belly, without the covers flopping all over the place and dragging the book to one side. To have designed one book like that may suggest petty economy, but to do two represents a lack of knowledge of the engineering of books.) Unlike other books that use CORBA 3 in the title, this book actually goes into all the new material that will eventually come out as the next version of CORBA. So this book covers objects-by-value, the new language mappings, the new Persistence Service, and the CORBA Components Model. The introduction makes very clear that these are all adopted OMG specifications, and that announcing them as a complete package with the title CORBA 3 will happen just as soon as the OMG is satisfied that all these specifications are actually commercially available. Meanwhile the CD ROM allows you to play with various vendor implementations of the pieces. While not strictly a part of CORBA 3, this book goes thoroughly into the POA. (The whimsical example explaining POA concepts like servants etc. is itself worth the price of the book, and it is the only book where I actually got some insight into objects-by-value, something that I must confess that until now I could but dimly grasp even after reading the specifications numerous times.) The book also covers a number of domain specifications; so it is state of the art. I doubt you could do better at this time.
Rating:
Summary: Embarrassment for the OMG
Review: The book is a major disappointment. How can the title include "CORBA 3", althought the specification isn't even available (and won't be for quite some time)? Things that have long been deprecated (like the BOA) are still being used for the code samples. Important topics such as the POA are described in a few pages only. It seems that the author tries to explain everything there is to CORBA, but only manages to scratch the surface of each topic. It is a roller coaster of topics which is to be expected by having a dozen co-authors. The most embarrassing fact is that the author is working for the OMG. Spend your money on the excellent book by Henning & Vinoski. Whatever programming language you use, Siegel's book is worthless.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial and embarrassing
Review: This book has CORBA 3 in the title but CORBA 3 doesn't even exist yet. Despite this claim to conformance to a non-existing standard, the code examples use the BOA, which was deprecated ages ago. The POA is covered in only about three pages, which nowhere near enough. Other topics are covered to a similar level of non-detail. This book is definitely no use if you are programmer, and even for non-programmers, the coverage is probably too superficial to be of much use.
Rating: 
Summary: pretty good back from new CORBA tech perspective
Review: This is a pretty good book for the beginners as well as the hardcore CORBA/JAVA programmers. The examples and the sample codes are quite interesting and realistic. Some of the CORBA ideas are not explained in full details though.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating experience for me...
Review: This is the 5th CORBA book I've read, and the first one to help me understand how to write a CORBA program. I followed all the code in the book to create an OrbixWeb version of the author's programs. I'm very happy to say that the example works. In using the code from the book (I typed everything in, and didn't use the CD-ROM), I only needed to make 6 minor changes to the code to the get it to work (and I have never written a CORBA program before). I initially tried running CORBA examples from other books (including the Orbix Web documentation itself!), but the programs were always incomplete. There never seemed to be a step-by-step approach - until I picked up Jon Siegel's book. His treatment of OrbixWeb was absolutely correct. Thank you, Jon!
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