The Complete Book of Middleware

Rating:
Summary: Like Getting Breakfast from a Fire Hose
Review: The accronyms alone will kill you in the first few chapters unless you wear special protective gear while reading this book. If you haven't got the faintest clue about middleware when you start reading, you'll find yourself half-drowned, bedraggled, and nearly as clueless when you finish. A truly "Complete Book of Middleware" ought to at least have a chapter that orients the reader to middleware--that way we know which acronyms to duck and which to glom on to!

This seems to be quite the shotgun approach to middleware. Make that a fully automatic shotgun with a large magazine. From Java to CORBA to specific vendors and program scripts, Ms. Myerson manages to cover a lot of ground, sometimes deeply, sometimes shallowly, and mostly with acronyms. I useful (?) overview, but one that will leave the reader wanting to buy more focused books to solve real life problems--or run out to hire a consultant who knows it all anyway.

I found several chapters quite relevant to a project I'm currently working on--although they mostly describe why current business solutions are inadequate to solve our particular problem. I also found that the relevant chapters demanded that I purchase more books so that I could leverage what I had read into real information.

So, know a bit about middleware _before_ you get this book. Then, if you need a description of (nearly) current systems and approaches that covers vast amounts of acreage, give this one a shot to see where you need to focus your reading--but plan on buying other books.

This is not "The Complete Book of Middleware," it's a modestly broad-based and exhausting introduction to what's out there and what it does.

Rating:
Summary: Covers major vendor offerings and middleware in general
Review: This collection of papers is divided among eight major topic areas, each on a specific middleware category. The main value of this book is the wide range of technologies and vendor solutions, and the fact that it's up to date (at the time of this review).

I like the complete coverage of both transaction and queuing approaches, and the vendor-specific information that includes Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java, as well as everything in between. The sections database middleware and middleware performance are especially valuable because they are more generic and applicable to a wider audience than the MS- and Java-centric sections.

While individual papers have a slight vendor bias, the book as a whole is vendor neutral. This is not a book for learning about middleware as much as a good description of what's currently available and their strengths and weaknesses. If you are looking for a more general book I recommend Chris Britton's "IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems" for the fundamentals, and David Linthicum's "B2B Application Integration" for a detailed text on how to employ middleware in practice. However, this book will give vendor-specific details and a more up-to-date view of middleware that are missing from Britton's and Linthicum's books. If you're a system architect or consultant this book is an excellent desk reference.

Rating:
Summary: Covers major vendor offerings and middleware in general
Review: This collection of papers is divided among eight major topic areas, each on a specific middleware category. The main value of this book is the wide range of technologies and vendor solutions, and the fact that it's up to date (at the time of this review).

I like the complete coverage of both transaction and queuing approaches, and the vendor-specific information that includes Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java, as well as everything in between. The sections database middleware and middleware performance are especially valuable because they are more generic and applicable to a wider audience than the MS- and Java-centric sections.

While individual papers have a slight vendor bias, the book as a whole is vendor neutral. This is not a book for learning about middleware as much as a good description of what's currently available and their strengths and weaknesses. If you are looking for a more general book I recommend Chris Britton's "IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems" for the fundamentals, and David Linthicum's "B2B Application Integration" for a detailed text on how to employ middleware in practice. However, this book will give vendor-specific details and a more up-to-date view of middleware that are missing from Britton's and Linthicum's books. If you're a system architect or consultant this book is an excellent desk reference.