This book is a guide to building distributed applications, using web browsers, CORBA/DCOM, RPC, TP systems, etc. It is pitched at a technical level, though I did notice several things that grated, such as a box labelled 'Additional Web Protocols' containing bullet points IPv6, VRML and IRC. A serious mixing- up of different types of things, in my opinion. Also 'so a Java applet (an Active X component) can call a remotely located Microsoft Word document ..' . Now I may be wrong, but I think that a Java applet isn't an ActiveX component, though I believe applets can be wrapped in an ActiveX bridge. It all seems a bit 'not quite right', though not exactly wrong either.

This is the sort of book I usually find very interesting, but I struggled to read this one and ended up skipping large sections to get to the end. There is a lot of information in this book, but I found the style very hard going, the English didn't seem very natural and when combined with some technical oddities, this very much put me off.

I think with some serious re-editing to improve the style and more critical technical reviewing this could be quite a good book, since it covers some interesting topics, but in its current form it isn't for me.