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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
Understanding CORBA
Author:
Randy Otte, Paul Patrick&Mark Roy
ISBN:
0 13 459884 9
Publisher:
Prentice Hall
Pages:
200pp
Price:
£33-99
Reviewer:
Mark Radford
Subject:
object oriented; unix; CORBA and COM
Appeared in:
10-3
CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is the OMG's (Object Management Group) specification for a standard object oriented software architecture. This book gives as its target audience, both developers needing to obtain a general knowledge of CORBA and designers needing to know how to use it to create a distributed application. The three authors who work for, or have worked for, DEC.

Coverage is comprehensive. It includes an overview of CORBA and the design of CORBA client and server applications. There are code examples given in (badly written) C code. The book claims that no knowledge of object orientation is needed, but I think readers will struggle if they don't know the basics.

Now for some bad news. In my opinion the book is not well written. Reading it was hard going, simply because I found the language unfriendly. Its downfall is that it is intended as a tutorial, but reads like a technical manual. There is no need for this to be the case. Technical books can be made easy and enjoyable to read (the recent works of Martin Fowler are, in my opinion, good examples).

Other publishers have competing books out at the moment. My recommendation is to have a close look at the (and if possible, wait for the reviews of) the alternatives before buying this one.