Enterprise Corba

Enterprise CORBA, Dirk Slama, Jason Garbis, Perry Russell, 366 pages

ISBN 013-0839-639 Enterprise CORBA is a book about building distributed enterprise applications using CORBA. It's not a tutorial, and has only a small amount of example code. It works more at the concept level, although it's still quite technical.

You can't read this book without learning a lot about CORBA, but most of areas the book covers have some general applicability, and sometimes quite a lot. The authors are consultants for IONA, but the book is not vendor-specific. IONA offerings only receive occasional mention in passing.

I read this book with two aims in mind, first to gain a casual understanding of CORBA's capabilities, and second to learn about building distributed enterprise applications in general. I was pretty pleased on both accounts. The book may be more valuable for its CORBA-specific advice, but if you're building enterprise applications, even using another technology, it's probably wise to know something about how CORBA handles things.

The book does sometimes read like an alphabet soup of acronyms, but I think that's really a CORBA issue, rather than a problem with the book. A glossary might have been nice, though. There were also a fair number of typos in what otherwise was a professionally laid out book. The book also contains a lot of diagrams, some of which are more helpful than others. Some of them seem to be overly elaborate for the amount of information they're conveying. This doesn't really hurt the quality of the rest of the book, but be forewarned.

This isn't a perfect book, but it's still a pretty good one. I think the primary reason is simply that the authors have a lot of practical experience with the technology, and they relate it at exactly the right level of depth. If you are using CORBA or soon will be, then you should certainly read this book. It is also a good introduction to CORBA if you just want to know more about it.

-- CurtisBartley

I also read this book, and agree that it's pretty good at what it does. What I'm wondering is what book would make a good companion to this one? This book is about very "high-level" issues. I'd need 1 book about the mechanics, the PIDL standards, etc etc. Suggestions?

--AlainPicard

AdvancedCorbaProgrammingWithCeePlusPlus and JavaProgrammingWithCorba are good low-level introductions to CORBA programming. The ObjectManagementGroup's CORBA specs are themselves pretty readable.

[CategoryBook, CategoryCorba]