Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference for reliable distributed computing
Review: Ken Birman is one of the foremost academic experts in this still young field. This book will give you a good understanding of the different techniques available for ensuring reliable communications between machines: from transactions to group communication systems.

It is *not* a book for novicies, though his style is still quite readable. It's a very dense text - not much whitespace or many diagrams.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent marriage of theory and practice
Review: Kenneth Birman is one of the best at bringing together an academic thoroughness with a real-world practicality. He explains concepts well. In addition, many parts of the book stand on their own quite well. That is, you can skip chapters that are not relevant to your current work, and still glean tremendous insight into the issues and ideas presented. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in understanding how to implement distributed applications or replication strategies.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent marriage of theory and practice
Review: Kenneth Birman is one of the best at bringing together an academic thoroughness with a real-world practicality. He explains concepts well. In addition, many parts of the book stand on their own quite well. That is, you can skip chapters that are not relevant to your current work, and still glean tremendous insight into the issues and ideas presented. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in understanding how to implement distributed applications or replication strategies.

Rating:
Summary: Worst book that i have come across
Review: This is by far most useless book among the books about Network. It does not explain the concepts well. It doesn't serve as a reference well.