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Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services

Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Concise Description of Distributed Services
Review: David Chappel deserves a standing ovation for this book. As a speaker, author, editor, teacher, consultant and architect I find this author of this book informative, enjoyable, insightful, educating, knowledgeable, and original. If you are trying to figure out how your enterprise architecture fits into Windows 2000 directory services, COM+, Transaction Server, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), etc - then this is your book. If it's not on your shelf, then you are missing a key to unlock the potential of Windows 2000.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A great book to pass on new techs
Review: Having read Chappell's five star ++ book "Understanding ActiveX and OLE" I was a little disappointed. So many diverse topics. Anyhow compared to the rest of the crowd this is clearly five star. Its enjoyable pretty easy read, technically exact and you learn a lot. The topic is still important. This might change with Microsoft.Net becoming strong, though.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Absolutely Superb
Review: I am the author of the book Enterprise JavaBeans, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly). As an author I was impressed with Chappell's ability to communicate very complex concepts with elegance, depth and clarity. David Chappell is clearly one of the best writers in the industry. As a distributed computing architect I found Chappell's coverage of the entire Windows 2000 distributed computing platform to be outstanding. Every architect, developer, and manager worth their salt should own a copy of this book. I give it my highest recommendation -- it's one of the best technical books I have ever read.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I really like this book and the authors writing style.
Review: I'm not a computer programmer, and I was not using this book to learn how to code applications. With that out of the way, I do like this book for several reasons. I like the material coverage. It explains Microsoft distributed technologies in a way that a Information Manager can understand. One way that the author does this is by leaving out program code. The code is left out so as to not distract or confuse the overall concepts. I thought the material was sufficiently deep enough to get you to a level that is more than just an overview of these technologies. It is for these reasons that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will definitely look into more titles from this author.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An excellent overview
Review: Like Mr. Chappell's previous book (Understanding ActiveX and OLE, 1996) this newer one is an excellent overview of cornerstone Windows technologies.

This book tells you what MS has in stock for those who needs to build a distributed application(s) or environment. It's not very technical, there is no source code at all, but we are talking about thinking readers, aren't we ? For somebody who needs to _understand_, this is a book of choice. You can't expect a book to include a working code of a bank teller's workplace, can you ? Once you read this book - you are the guy with the tools to do it.

Surprisingly enough this book does not praise MS at all. There is a couple of scary lines like "MS does support standards but it also chooses to improve them", but still it gives a fair view of what MS offers. It does not give you that "look ! we've invented another acronym for the same 20 years old techology !" feeling. Very fair book.

The book is very easy to read and is well laid out. Ten chapters are of only slight dependency to each other. Covers Active Directory, distributed security, COM+, MSMQ, web-based thingies.

Highly recommended.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Excellent book, Limited audience
Review: The audience for this book is relatively limited. Administrators will not find it helpful, as it does not demonstrate the installation or set-up of any of the services. Technology managers will probably experience difficulty in understanding the book. Finally, most programmers will be frustrated by its lack of code examples. The target audience is probably the sub-set of programmers who wish to understand the entire scope of Windows 2000 and how it functions. In this regard the book excelled.

The initial chapters covered directory serves and security, followed COM, DCOM, and data access. Up until this point, the book was relatively average. The discussion on Kerbos and password hashing of timestamps was intriguing, but the rest was relatively redundant. However, the remaining chapters on distributed transactions, and COM+ were extremely helpful. The material detailing the two-step-transaction commit process and the functionality of the ObjectContext interfaces was very concise and informative.

Overall, I give this book four stars. Although sections of the book easily qualify for five stars, the weaker chapters and limited audience detracts from the overall score.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: For a very specialized readership.
Review: The information in this book, by being very specialized, is very much different from a guide with a clear purpose that would be handy for most administrators. Probing theoretical discussions of all the latest Microsofty technological wrinkles and details are best suited for technicians well acquainted with them already. But even for this audience (and, certainly, just about everybody else), the contents are, ultimately, extremely frustrating because of the author's resolution to provide absolutely no code or even a perspective about the priorities of things to do and how one should go about doing them.

It is not a question of generalities versus specifics. Rather, it is a question of specifics that are empty.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Delivers on its title
Review: This book does exactly what its title says...it provides an overview of all components in Windows 2000 that you would interact with when writing or using distributed services.

I highly recommend this book for its two chapters on security in Windows 2000. It gives a terrific explanation of both private and public key security (something I've been looking for) and talks about how these are implemented in Windows 2000. These two chapters are a treasure for anyone who has to deal with security issues on a project involving W2K.

It also gives a good overview of what Active Directory is as well as COM/DCOM, COM+ and MSMQ. These topics are informative and top level...if you're interested in code and implementation details, there are books dedicated to each of these topics. I think this book serves as a good top-level reference for writing distributed apps with W2K. It helps you get a view of the forest before becoming entrenched in the trees. David Chappell has a way of explaining complicated topics in an easy to read manner while not hiding the important details.


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