This book sells itself as 'for developers who are new to programming in distributed environments. It also supports a variety of courses where the central theme is object-oriented development with middleware technologies.' The best thing I can say is it hits its target, added to which the web site (http://www.distributed-objects.com/) provides a list of the question with model answers. It's a book I feel happy to recommend.

The book is written in an academic style and as such can be slight heavy going at times, however well worth it, as the coverage is accurate, detailed and well explained, with the use of UML where appropriate. It looks at CORBA, COM and Java/RMI and provides a good comparison of what each brings to the problems and solutions examined in the book. There are code examples on Java, C++, IDL and Microsoft's IDL, though detailed knowledge of each is not required to read the book.