ISBN: 0471183334
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 2
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Summary: Instant CORBA Marketing Glossies
Don't bother. This book contains just enough information to make you think there's probably something here but you'd be wrong. Some of the chapters are so skinny it's not clear why there there at all. For example Naming Services: Naming in a nutshell, 2 pages, How it works, < 1 page.The authors' declared pattern to the book's exposition, which would be great if it were actually executed to a substantive level, is to enumerate the service APIs and then "demonstrate" the use of the service. But alot of this stuff is actually very deep subject matter. Take Transactions and Concurrency, for example. Reading this chapter (15 pages) will either make you feel that you missed something big (and you did, it's just not in this book) or that you got ... (and you might be right on with that assessment too).
Summary: Old, Tacky, And Clearly Written
I needed to understand CORBA very quickly. This was the onlybook on the shelf at my local bookstore that did not seem way too complex for a beginner so I bought it. I had done a quick Internet search on CORBA and found a six-page overview that was several years old. I am afraid that Instant Corba was only a little more useful than those pages. The book is current through 1996 technology and that was a long, long time ago (as of August 2000). If the authors had concentrated on concepts and ideas rather than getting tangled up with then current commercial implementations of CORBA the book would have more lasting value. To be fair, they do provide a clear overview of CORBA concepts and mechanisms. And considering that CORBA 3 is at hand while this book is from the era of CORBA 1 it does a good job of providing a grasp of what distributed object architecture and request brokering is about. If you need a high level over view it works. I thought the technical sections were great for teaching a manager what CORBA details involve but they were too high level to help if you need to actually code something... I guess I got what I wanted from this book. The reason it does not get a higher rating from me as an introduction is that it was tacky when it was brand new with it's theme of being a Martian report on CORBA, an intergalactic client/server web technology. And the cutesy stuff only worsened with age. Since it is an introduction the authors should have done a better job of choosing and explaining their vocabulary. Talking about information blobs and object webs with enthusiasm does not really help a beginner to understand what the industry is doing with object sharing to facilitate access to services. The book talks about middleware frequently and I think they should have presented that as a concept and worked on it's definition. Finally, the authors kept moving in and out of discussing then current products. The book frequently sounds like a marketing spiel and yet new ones replaced these products years ago. Weren't they familiar with upgrades, mergers, and market failures in 1996?
Summary: Irritating style, inferior writing, out of date
First, a word about style. If you are irritated by the idea of a book that tries really hard to be all about funny little Martians being blown away by the sheer coolness of CORBA on the internet then do not touch this book. It's not clever, it's not funny and unlike John Gray's books, it does not serve a purpose of illustrating any particular concepts.Next, a word about the title. It is misleading. The book is about CORBA applications distributed over the internet to form what the authors refer to as the Object Web. If you want a book to tell you about using CORBA in another contect, then this is the wrong book. The book is split into four parts with a recommendation that reading parts 1 and 4 will give a non-technical introduction to CORBA and that parts 2 and 3 form more technical material which may be skipped. Well, if that is the case, why not put the fourth part after the first and before the two technical sections? The non-technical sections of the book contain little other than lists of suppliers and a claim that the web will soon be based almost entirely on CORBA. The introduction to CORBA that they give is inferior to that in most other CORBA books and now out of date The sections that are claimed to be technical are not. They are really just introductory concepts that are necessary before embarking on a book on CORBA programming. Having said that, they do provide a better introduction than many dedicated programming books. Finally, the index is very poor. When I tried to use it, I found more entries were in error than correct and I gave up on it.
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