Customer Reviews

Distributed Computing: Principles and Applications

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(2)
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This book frustrated me. It had typos everywhere, improper grammer and incorrect code samples. That was my main problem with this. Although the author states that he's had many students review this over two years, he should've looked it over more than once. Maybe I should be a book editor with all of the errors I caught! I don't think this book should have been published in its current state... ESPECIALLY at $70 for a paperback. The organization of the book seemed choppy. I personally would have had RMI and CORBA back to back as competing remoting technologies, and then have the two Internet-related chapters together.

As for content: this book was good for learning basic network programming, RMI, CORBA, and Servlets. All through the book, the author makes numerous references to other RFCs and web sites for further details. This book was itself such an introductory text, I wonder why print it at all, if all of these sources are availalbe for free online (again, $70). For a book just published, it was disappointingly weak in the JSP and Web Service areas which are the major distributed computing technologies emerging today (for Java, at least)! The author also seemed ignorant of the web service basics (which might be why he said little about it) and just gave a description of a SOAP message (incorrectly on some points: an xml namespace is NOT simply the company name).

If this wasn't for a required class, I'd surely return it! If you want to learn how to do sockets and internet programming, my old "Java Network Programming" book by Hughes, Merlin, and Conrad was much better. If you want to do remoting technologies, there is an O'Reilly book on RMI. If you want to do web services get a book on that. To the publisher: if you pay me, I'll edit your books for you.

I'm sure I could go on more but I'll stop here. I'll say, "thumbs down." My two cents.

The overly priced book attempts to explain distributed computing. Unfortunately, Liu's grammar is so poor that the book is hard to understand at times. The book was written a while ago and a lot of it is outdated. I would not recommend this book.

If you read the author's reasons for this book, I think it meets these objectives well. It is intended as an introduction to the topic of Distributed Computing but also meeting the IEEE/ACM model curricula.

There are enough typos, that a newer edition would be worthwhile. You can find the list of corrections on the author's website. Since the book was written in 2004, it would benefit from updates on current state of the technology.

As was pointed out by previous review, there is a lot of material on the various aspects of distributed computing, but this book is a good starting point before jumping into great detail on a specific area.