Rating: 
Summary: An excellent guide to advanced features
Review: Written by the OMG, this book is NOT for beginners, but if you get CORBA for dummies and this book, you'll be in like Flint! It is OMG's explanation of new features that are in CORBA 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4, collectively referred to as CORBA 3. The book is thick and meaty, and after a brief 100-page intro, gets down to the real business of explaining the new Services such as Naming, Event, Transaction, and Security Services as well as the CORBA Component Model. I can't name all of the new CORBA 3 features here. Simply to state - this book covers them all. It's must-reading for all experienced CORBA programmers.My favorite CORBA 3 feature is Asynchronous Method Invocation. Prior to CORBA 2.4, all CORBA calls have been synchronous (blocking). This book gives a general overview (11 pages) of the new AMI. Enough so that, if you have an ORB that supports it, you can get the ball rolling. Typical of the rest of the book, this section leaves one wanting more info, but in a 900 page book there's only so much detail you can give. I highly recommend this book to CORBA programmers. In addition to bringing you up-to-date on the new features, it also provides 7 trial-version ORBs on the CD, plus all of the book's source code. The CORBA Component Model is basically Enterprise Java Beans in a Lanbguage-independent form. It allows vendors to provide CORBA object which you can license and use, sort of like COM/DCOM objects. CORBA existed before COM. It's almost as if Microsoft took CORBA and Redmondized it. If you use Windows, you have COM and SOAP and .NET and whatever else Bill wants to pour down your throat. For the rest of us, the OMG is the best friend we have, and CCM is well worth learning. Java, C++, and COBOL are all treated in this book. I could go on and on. Bottom line: this is not the best introduction-to-CORBA book. It is, though, the one that will bring CORBA users up-to-date on the new features.
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