A good effort.

I had high hopes for this book. It's very readable and pitches at a good level, somewhere between impatient pro and interested amateur. It's taken a lot more than 14 days though, with chapter 6 requiring you to type in and debug c. 1200 lines of C++ code.

Also, although the text claims to be compatible with Visibroker, it isn't directly compatible with version 4.0, which uses POA instead of BOA. You can get backward compatibility with a combination of IDL compiler switches and options passed to the ORB on start up, but expect significant digging in the Visibroker manuals to get to this point.

To use one of the other ORBs listed in the book, which the author achnowledges will need hacks to the code, would be difficult, unless you were already CORBA literate. But then, why are you here?

There are also significant annoying typos. The book needs a new edition (IMHO), with POA, and distribution with a CD containing the examples and an open source ORB like TAO.

I learned a lot from this book, but with a significant amount of frustration at trying to get the examples to work.

Other Reviews

• Bad Examples
• I love this book.
• Do you want the Good News, or the Bad News ?
• A good effort.
• Excellent as a refresher on CORBA