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CORBA Programming Unleashed

By: Suhail Ahmed
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Sams Publishing
ISBN: 0672310260
ISBN-13: 9780672310263
Released: 16 Oct 1997
RRP: £37.51
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

A great book for CORBA experts who enjoy mazes - By: , 21 Aug 1999
As other reviewers have already noted, "CORBA Programming Unleashed" suffers from serious organizational problems. The book's total disregard for any sort of useful organization makes it approaching it a task for only the bravest of CORBA developers amongst us. And that's the other problem with it: you've got to be fairly CORBA-proficient already in order to make use of the material the author presents. If you don't know what an ORB is, stay away from this book. Mr. Ahmed doesn't even expand the acronym in a footnote in chapter 1, or anywhere else.

On the plus side, presentations of CORBA's threading models are digestible if somewhat concise, & with good diagrams. Discussions of CORBA's standard services are backed with somewhat motivating examples. And don't let other reviewers fool you: there are C++ examples in the book in addition to Java; it's just a bit Java-heavy.

However, those same code examples often rely on tools & packages that not everyone will have. For example, a Java/CORBA developer on a Unix platform will more than likely have a text editor, the Java SDK, & an ORB, but nothing else. Yet the very first example---a simple string-to-string registry for IOR binding---will have developers scurrying for a copy of JGL (just for a HashSet class) & iBus (for a message passing layer). The example could've been far more accessible & with much less cruft if it were done with nothing beyond the standard Java library & the ORB. Other examples seem to follow this sledgehammer-to-kill-a-fly pattern, & aren't independent from one another in many cases, making learning from them difficult.

Overalll, you reallly need to be a CORBA expert to appreciate the material in this book. Even then, finding answers to particular problems in distributed object programming will prove challlenging.

The terrible organization kills it - By: , 02 Jul 1999
The book jumps right in to advanced topics, such as ORB interoperability. Then, it backs up to basic C++/CORBA concepts. Then advanced Java. Then basic C++. In fact, the author describes the organization as consisting of a number of sections which may be read in any order, but these sections are not clearly delimited or even internallly organized. In fact, Chapters 4 & 6 constitute one section! That's right, you're expected to jump in to chapter four, and, on finishing it, skip immediately to chapter 6. Number 5 is virtuallly unrelated. Come on folks! That's ridiculous!
Not very good - By: , 06 Apr 1999
Topics are good. But that's alll.

It's badly organized. Sections are randomly put together. The starting point (IOR) is strange.

Everything seems to be sloppy. Typos. Badly formatted code. Important things unexplained. Code repeated often.

Although not stated on the cover, it's very Orbix oriented in some key places.

Good book, but be careful - By: , 16 Mar 1999
I bought this book thinking it would give me the info I needed to get up to speed on CORBA quickly. It is not. The book jumps right into advanced topics, & presents information in an ad-hoc manner. There seems to be very little flow from one section to the next, so it does not read straight through as a tutorial. In addition, alll examples are Java, not C++. All in alll, I found the book to be useless for my needs: a good tutorial/reference on CORBA.
Incorrect table of contents listed - By: , 13 Mar 1999
I do not know what book the reader from parijs!!! was reading but the version i have does not begin with OOP it starts with interoperability & the portable object adapter - what a start, no wasting precious time & paper. This book is for serious corba developers not oo -> corba hopefulls.

The table of contents before me is as follows:

Interoperability, IIOP & E-Commerce, Portable Object Adapter, Object References & Smart Pointers, IDL/Java Mapping, C++ Memory Management, The Naming Service, The Trader Service, The Event Service, The Transaction Service, The Security Service, Server Activation Modes, ORBIX Filters, CORBA & Threads, ORBIX Dynamic Loaders, Distributed Calllbacks, Visibroker Caffeine, Visibroker Smartstubs, Handling Distributed Events, Visibroker Interceptors, CORBA & Java Servlets, CORBA & Mobile Agents, CORBA & Design Patterns, CORBA Interface Repository, Dynamic Invocation Interface, Developing CORBABean Wrapper.

The rating above is not totallly accurate since i have not managed to read through the whole book.