Customer Reviews

Mobile Agents

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mobile Agents by Cockayne and Zyda is the first book to provide tutorial coverage of the world of mobile agents. Mobile agents are programs that go out across the network and act on your desires for purchasing, travel or whatever you desire. The book has a nice, introductory overview for those not full up to speed on mobile agents and is targeted for that audience. It is well written and concise. It discusses in detail three complete agent systems: Agents for remote access (Ara), Agent Tcl, and Telescript. In addition, it discusses Aglets workbench, a Java-based agent system. There are some newer agent systems that should have perhaps been included in the text and they may be included in a second edition. The CD provided with the text provides development environments for agent systems and is an excellent resource for those just starting out in agents. This is a major contribution and the authors are to be congratulated!

I teach a course on mobile agents with this text and find it quite nice. There is no other book that I know of that provides the basics, along with real working systems. The books does not kill us with the latest, incomprehensible research but rather works from the ground up. It is a not to be missed text if you are attempting to teach the basics of mobile agents!

This book gives good insight into the agent domain and good coverage of ongoing interesting projects regarding mobile agents. This book also provides a good overview of Aglets workbench, Agent Tcl, and Telescript. This book is very good if you want to know about intelligent agent technology and some of the implementation details.

The blurb on this book promises an in depth look at mobile agent technology, with example code. In reality it offers little more than a behind the times look at various agent architectures, this look apparently taken verbatim from the various company web sites. The chapter on Telescript, in particular, (dropped by General Magic in favour of Odyssey!) is a direct copy of the material available on the General Magic website. I appreciate that the author states that the material is presented by the particular framework author, however I object to paying for material which is free to anyone on the web. This book won't teach you how to write mobile agents, and isn't a particularly good book for research. Incidentally the score of 2 is given as I have yet to examine the CD, should this prove as disappointing as the book then the rating should be considered 0.

The book is an excellent introduction to Internet agents and is just the thing to start using mobile agents on the Internet. While much of the text is available from disparate web sites, it is great to have this in hand in readable form. The CD is an excellent collection of resources for those trying to get up to speed on mobile agents. Enjoy!