Rating: 
Summary: The first book on application server internals!
Review: This book could have been subtitled "The Science of Application Servers." Well-written and extremely comprehensive!
Rating:
Summary: Tremendously useful for CORBA architects and developers.
Review: This book does a *great* job of explaining the design issues that must be considered when building large-scale CORBA systems.The parts on IDL design, fault tolerance and load balancing, and database integration were particularly helpful to me. The knowledge in this book will be extremely useful for anyone designing or implementing a CORBA system, regardless of the ORB product being used.
Rating:
Summary: Best book for intermediate to advanced Corba developers
Review: This book is something I sure wish I had about 3 years ago. But I'll take it now. It conveys a deeper understanding gained from practical experience that the standards spouting Corba books do not have. If you have already worked on Corba for a little bit and understand the basic design issues, you will get a lot out of this book to go to the next level.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book on design; will leave coders cold
Review: This is relatively advanced book on CORBA, that covers issues of design of distributed systems using CORBA. If it wasn't for the CORBA focus (and, obviously, consideration of some CORBA specifics) this would be a good book for the designer of any distributed system. This is not a book for the person who wishes to learn how to program using CORBA. Rather, it is aimed squarely at the system architect. The concerns it raises are real, and design trade-offs are carefully considered. On CORBA specifics, the main weakness is that the book refers to superseded parts of the CORBA standard. The book is well laid out, and information relatively easy to find.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for managers, and those looking for buzzwords..
Review: Very high level discussion of the topics of CORBA, probably good for Coffee table discussions. Need a powerful CORBA Book? There's none out there! The closest one to teach you good concepts is the one by Mitchi Henning and Steve Vinoski.
Rating:
Summary: A "must-read" book for CORBA developers
Review: With this book the authors have filled a gaping void in the CORBA literature: to describe in usable, practical terms the design of high-end, production CORBA systems. I have years of experience in CORBA, and I learned a lot from this book. The sections on database integration, persistence, and transactions are invaluable, and you just can't get it anywhere else. The book is quite well-written, notable for its clarity of exposition and organized presentation. I found the most salient feature of this book was that it made CORBA seem exciting! It described how to design and architect really interesting CORBA systems, with patterns that show how to do replication, fault-tolerance, distributed transactionality. The book also does a good job of distinguishing between parts of CORBA that exist only on paper and the parts that are really implemented. Some authors are unrealistic in their assessment of the state of the CORBA. I had two complaints. First, I would have liked to have seen much more detailed examples and code samples. Second, the authors seem to suggest that GUI tools are akin to ease-of-use - they mention several times how GUI-based tools will make CORBA easier to use. I have never felt that GUI tools are necessarily related to ease-of-use, and indeed their use I think can lead to maintenance problems. (For instance, the authors say they look forward to GUI tools coming out of Borland/Inprise). I think a clean, well-documented API; a robust ORB; and a good set of examples; and emacs; is much more useful than some fancy tool. But I'm maybe out of step with fashion here. In summary, this is absolutely a must-have book for anyone involved in CORBA! For beginners, it opens vistas; for experts, it has something to teach; for developers, it is a reference, chock full of ideas.
| 
