Early Adapter JXTA : Peer to Peer computing with Java

<pre>Author/s : Sung Li
Publisher : Wrox
Category : Misc. Java
Review by : Kyle Brown
Rating : 4 horseshoes</pre>
While I was excited when I received this book, my excitement did not last through the ordeal of reading it
The book begins slowly by covering why Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is important. However, it then quickly moves from basic to very advanced topics without enough intermediate steps. Chapters 2 & 3 provide a detailed overview of the JXTA technology, without any guidance as to how to use it to build P2P systems. The author doesn’t "ground" the reader in the topics they’ve seen before moving on to other detailed issues.
The book improves later, though. Chapter 4 has some interesting peer-to-peer patterns (which would have been better earlier) but they end far too soon. Also, there are no code examples for the patterns. There is a case study in the book - unfortunately in the penultimate chapter, too late to clarify the earlier issues. What’s more, the example wastes too much time on covering unnecessary Swing GUI code.
However, it was the book’s editing and composition that disturbed me the most. For instance, this book doesn’t include an index - something absolutely unforgivable! Also, the editing of the book was terrible - grammar errors abound. It made me wonder if the book had been proofread before going to press.
So I would not recommend this book. Instead, I felt I learned more about JXTA by reading the white papers and documentation on the JXTA web site.
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