Customer comments on this selection.
 Don't judge this book by its cover
A few reviewers of this book already noted its impenetrable prose style and descriptions lacking specifics.
While I am not a specialist in all topics described in this book, I found it to be imprecise and, occasionally, downright wrong or misleading in parts where I had specific knowledge to the contrary. Many times language would appear to be made purposefully ambiguous, as if the author did not quite know what he is talking about. This type of ambiguity may be fine in general literature, but a presumably scientific textbook talking about logical and structured discipline should not be so written.
This book was a required text for my graduate course. I certainly would not have purchased it voluntarily. I find that after reading most of it I gained no useful information or any additional insights that were not otherwise known or available to me.
Add to that bad editing that left the book with a fair amount of typos, grammatical and style errors and the end result is not great.
The cover design is great, though.
 Painful, but informative...
This books is, if nothing else, thorough. When you start thinking of distributed systems (or even just working with Application Servers in general), you're going to have to trudge your way through this book sooner or later in order to understand what's going on and what everyone is talking about.
It's definitely informative and you will walk away with a lot of information, but you're never going to say it was a pleasant experience.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything out there written any better than this.
 Arrived on time, perfect condition
It arrived before I even got around to checking the shipping status. It arrived untouched. If only my teacher was actually using the book!
 Decent book for students
If you're expecting a "how-to" manual on writing distributed systems, this isn't it. It has an excellent coverage of some fundamental principles - I used it as a text book for a distributed systems course and found it very useful. The course and this book changed the way I think about system architecture. Some readers may find the material dry - it is, but in the end it's rewarding. It helps to have an exam at the end to drive you through this book. To the reviewer who said that it doesn't mention what's wrong with distributed objects or NFS, you'll find that it gives you the tools to see past the glossy hype of whatever the latest fad is (distributed objects, web services, or whatever else) and ask serious questions about how it handles failure, security, replication, etc.
Having said that, there were glaring grammatical errors, especially towards the end (the chapter on Distributed File Systems). I am surprised that it got past the editors. Also I had to re read some sections several times before I understood them (like the part about reliable group communication). It's still better than going through individual papers, but a more readable revised edition wouldn't hurt.
Good theorical book
If you buy this book expecting to learn how to do some web, rmi, corba or any other kind of distributed systems development then don't buy this one. This book is now a good source of theorical material, I'm currently using this book because of the theorical material but often I have to complement the information with other books like "Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (4th Edition)" (by: Coulouris) which has more indepth RMI practices and is also a good information source.
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