This book is, as the cover says, a behind the scenes look at eight of the World's largest client/server applications. It is split into three sections, the first gives a quick introduction to three tier architectures, Transaction Processing Monitors, especially Tuxedo.

The second and main section of the book, is a series of chapters, each one looking at a different real-life client server development. Most of these are seriously large systems, tens of thousands of clients, millions of transactions a day and gigabyte databases. Each system is described with the initial aims, how they went about it, what tools where used and ends with a short 'advice from the architect' box.

The final (short) section provides a summary of the lessons to be learned.

The whole book has an informative and easy to read style, with rather neat cartoon style diagrams of the architectures. Most of the systems are based around Tuxedo, though one was a CORBA development. I enjoyed reading the book, though I found the advice a bit simplistic, but maybe the best advice is also often the most obvious and easy to overlook. My only problem is I'm not sure who the target audience is. It's pitched at a fairly non-technical level, but isn't really a project management text book either. That said, if you are starting out on a large client server development, the investment of£18 to read about eight other projects and the lessons they learnt would be money well spent.