The impact on the book of Max spending ten years at Sun Microsystems from 1993 to 2003 is clear. Those were essentially the years that the world learned about the Web. Sun was not shy at investing research dollars on technologies needed to prove that the network is the computer. Max had access the Sun thought machine, including thought leader thinkers like Bill Joy and James Gosling, and the everyday exceptional thinkers like the engineers on the JINI team. These were the thinkers behind the Internet. And while it turns out that the pragmatists like Bill Gates built huge software businesses on Internet technology, Fitscapes and Fallacies makes me believe there is a huge untapped potential for distributed software applications.

Fitscapes and fallacies might have been better titled "The Nature and Nurture of the Internet." Fitscape is Max's word to describe the nature of distributed computing. Charles Darwin wrote about "autonomous agents competing for resources" and Max draws the conclusion that you can apply the same description to processes running in a grid of networked computers. The book begins with an explanation of the attributes of a fitscape and then talks about the protocols that are used to build a distributed application. Fitscapes and Fallaces then compares a number of fitscapes - yes, there are more than one - using Deutsche's 8 fallacies of network computing.

While the work is slightly academic, it delivers messages I wish every beginning software developer, QA technician, and IT manager would learn.

-Frank

This book makes me nostalgic for the early SAMS Publishing Unleashed series of books on Java. Remember when you first learned what a servlet was? That's the feeling I get when reading Enterprise Java Security. The book does a good job explaining how Secure Sockets Layer (SSL,) object-level security, Kerberos, and legacy security came about. It then shows detailed examples with sample code how to implement each of the security techniques. The text is surprisingly complete, including coverage of Web Service Security protocols and techniques.

Pop open this book and about 2 hours later you'll have regular expressions down. At least, I did! A very helpful chapter on parsing HTML solved an immediate problem I had. And I find all the examples I tried works with Jython, the Python scripting language implemented in Java, that I use in TestMaker, my open-source framework for testing Web-enabled applications for scalability, functionality, and performance. -Frank Cohen, PushToTest