<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for beginner
Review: A simple fact about something as complex as CORBA - no one book can satisfy every kind of roles or levels. Most books try to cover from bottom to top and become too complicated and too expensive for beginner or, too simple and general for advanced user. This book has achieved its purpose very well ie for an absolute beginner to CORBA but experienced in application development. The price is great too as it is not a reference that we want to keep when we become familiar with CORBA. The presentation is very good, simple and organised, no showing off of big words. I find it useful for both developers and architects. However, as most of its examples require code reading to understanding, it is more suitable for a competent DEVELOPER (ie not just programmer) of either Java/C++. A sound OO background will definite help. The 14 days schedule is suitable for IT professionals that read it in their own time. For full time study, 7 days is more than enough. The Q/A and Quiz at the end of each chapter. provide a good structured revision for someone like me who lack of discipline to revise after reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Do you want the Good News, or the Bad News ?
Review: A very frustrating book, because I actually want to like it, but can't. In many ways, it's actually quite a good introductory text, the explanations are mostly clear, and it's fairly well paced. BUT
The editorial staff as SAMS need a good spanking!
------------------------------------------------- The book is strewn with errors and typos, and I'm not just talking about spelling errors here (although there are many) A few examples: 1.; The class diagrams in chapter 5 are simply empty boxes with lines connecting them, somewhere along the way, the text in the boxes got lost. It's impossible to follow the example without the diagrams. 2. Each chapter has Quiz questions, and answers are found in an appendix. Problem is, some of the answers are to different questions! It appears that at some stage the questions got changed, and the answers weren't updated. 3. In the discussion of strings, the sample code that purports to show how to declare a fixed-length string, actually declares an array of variable length strings. In spite of my annoyance at this kind of error, I've given the book 2 stars, because there's a lot to like about other aspects of the book. If they come out with a second edition which fixes the errors, it would be well worth buying.
Rating: 
Summary: A good effort.
Review: I had high hopes for this book. It's very readable and pitches at a good level, somewhere between impatient pro and interested amateur. It's taken a lot more than 14 days though, with chapter 6 requiring you to type in and debug c. 1200 lines of C++ code. Also, although the text claims to be compatible with Visibroker, it isn't directly compatible with version 4.0, which uses POA instead of BOA. You can get backward compatibility with a combination of IDL compiler switches and options passed to the ORB on start up, but expect significant digging in the Visibroker manuals to get to this point. To use one of the other ORBs listed in the book, which the author achnowledges will need hacks to the code, would be difficult, unless you were already CORBA literate. But then, why are you here? There are also significant annoying typos. The book needs a new edition (IMHO), with POA, and distribution with a CD containing the examples and an open source ORB like TAO. I learned a lot from this book, but with a significant amount of frustration at trying to get the examples to work.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent as a refresher on CORBA
Review: If you are proficient C++/Java programer and have delved into the world of distributed computing in its many various forms (COM+/CORBA/EJB) and are familiar with UML, then this book will be easy to follow. As a technical architect I covered most of the material in three days and found it to be excellent as a refresher course on CORBA. The author does a good job on class design and laying out the code but getting the examples to work can prove quite daunting if this all new to you. For one Rosenberg should have used the freely available OmniORB instead of using Visigenic which you have to pay for (this would be an advisable approach for a later edition and for students if they ever use this book for a class). Another criticism i had was his use of Visual Cafe to design the GUI for Chapter 14. Please always take the least common denominator .. simply use the JDK and Swing to do all this stuff .. developers can always learn IDEs in their own spare time. Apart from that his Banking Application is an excellent realworld example of how you can put CORBA to work behind the scenes and chapter 14 is by far the best when you webify the entire application with a simple java GUI applet and all the CORBA business objects working together under the hood. Beginners to CORBA should read the examples throughly and understand the code fully before delving into the examples. Then you can use the OmniORB to do all the CORBA plumbing - stick with it and when you get it all working it will be rewarding. I can sympathise somewhat with some of the previous comments on the examples in the book. And where is the CD? I never got one with my edition. COM & CORBA - Side by Side is also an excellent resource to use as a supplement to this book. BTW -> OmniOrb is available at: http://www.uk.research.att.com/omniORB
<< 1 >>
| 
