This book is written by a SUN employee and covers just about all the networking related issues of Java, from sockets, through CORBA and the Java IDL, RMI, JDBC, Servlets and other networking features. The book is very clearly written, with good explanations and well chosen code examples. Covering so much in under 400 pages does mean some depth is missing, but you get a good feel for the main points. If you are doing, or thinking of doing, some network programming with Java, this book should be on your shelf.