Rating: 
Summary: Not very good
Review: I was EXTREMELY disappointed. It seems like quite an accomplishment to pack so little info in so many pages. First of all it left out many of the very essential parts of CORBA and instead concentrated related technologies things like EJB.In addition the comparisons ranged between slightly inaccurate to completely inane. They were so CORBA-centric, that they neglected to acknoledge the weaknesses that it has. And they compared things that don't warrant comparison such as Servlets and CORBA which are in NO WAY competing technologies. The only parts that I found vaguely useful were the tutorials some of which were well thought-out.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is horrible!
Review: I had expected this to be a comprehensive tutorial and reference. However, The examples won't work without serious tweaking, a majority of the book is wasted comparing or teaching other technologies, and the explanations are cursory. I read the "tutorial" for the Naming Service four times and still felt very unsure of the content. Do yourself a favor and avoid this book.
Rating: 
Summary: good insight to CORBA better for beginners
Review: I enjoyed reading this book.Good insight into client server programming and well classified chapters. It would have been better if there is an online support for this book. Only difficulty may be for those who know about client / server programming and wants only to know about corba. This book has more details about client / server programming (more than half of the book) and less about CORBA
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction to CORBA
Review: Having lived & breathed COM/DCOM for the past 3 years I have imbibed the litany of contempt put forth by the COM/DCOM pundits for all things JAVA or CORBA related. This book was specifically vilified. I found it to be a very good introduction to various distributed models, CORBA included; although it is more a comparison among them than a book just about CORBA/JAVA. The most balanced comparison between CORBA & DCOM I have ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of comparisions
Review: I found the authors comparing corba against rmi, and other stuff fill more than half of the book. If you want a book on programming corba with java beans or servlets, this is not for you, there are better books out there. Anand
Rating:
Summary: Very good for beginners/intermediate users
Review: I would definitely recommend this book, especially for the beginner-intermediate level. The concepts are covered well, but a bit more complicated than needed. This book gives you a lot of very useful examples and I found minor bugs in very few of them. Overall the book would be good as both the desktop reference as well as a study guide.
Rating:
Summary: No focus on CORBA
Review: Good book to introduce CORBA and some advanced features of Java (e.g. JDBC, Java Beans, EJB...). It introduces also a brief description of CORBA competitors (DCOM, RMI...). It will deceive those who are only interested in Programming CORBA with Java.
Rating:
Summary: OK book. Some code examples use specific JAVA/CORBA packgs.
Review: The first 3 examples in this book use code that is non-standard CORBA (it is specific to the Visigenec distribution). These examples comprise all of chapters 4, 5, and 6 so if you don't want to go Visigenic, these chapters aren't much help. With regard to the subsequent chapters, the authors contend that you can do a lot of the examples in JDK 1.2, but they don't offer any help in that regard. I got the example in chapter 7 to work using the JDK 1.2, but only after going to Sun's Web-site and working their example. The book needs some kind of glossary for the innumerable acronyms. In fact the authors themselves seem confused by the acronyms as phrases like "The IDL definition language...." attest. What's most disturbing about the book is that the authors are making no effort to support it on their web site (which is advertised in the book). The Web-site is essentially an ad for the book and the courses these two teach at San Jose (rather than, say, bug-fixes and ways to run their examples with different tools). Should you pay the $40 for it? I guess I don't regret it--it is the only CORBA book I have--and I did get ONE of the examples to work. But I think we need a grassroots movement to get Elliot Rusty Harold to write a book on the subject so we can toss this one. Finally, I should note that I am only about 150 pages into the book, so it may get a lot better.... But I doubt it.
Rating:
Summary: Fairly good conceptual overview; awful examples
Review: I never got the first example in the book to work. The Visibroker ORB was supposed to be included on the CD, but it wasn't. It turned out to be a $3,000 item from Borland, which you could download on a 60-day free trial. So I was sitting there running a huge (6 MEG) download to try to get example #1 to work. The book went in the trash. The Martian stuff is getting real old, too. The website has no helpful info.
Rating:
Summary: Get these authors an editor.
Review: I'm half way through the book, and I feel like shoving knitting needles in my eyes. 1) The examples are riddled with errors. For example, page 180 defines SVCnameroot to be CorbaJava on one line, and JavaCorba 3 lines later. Since the purpose of this setting hasn't really been defined yet, I blindly typed away, and wasted time until I noticed the difference. This occurs other places as well. On the same page, CountMultiClient is started without any settings. In the same chapter example code is repeated with improper headings. And although idl format has barely been described, two sections of idl are given pages apart, with no mention that it should go in the same source file. 2) The intergallactic web theme is getting really annoying. 3) It should be mentioned that no one in their right mind would use java, with its huge start up overhead, to write CGI code. This should be mentioned, and perhaps the stats for the same program in Perl should be given. 4) A little more information on what the command line settings mean should be given earlier in the text.
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