Two books on distributed

These two books by Amjad Umar apparently began their lives as a single volume, which was then cut into two parts given its size. The books deal in a sense with the same funda- mental thesis—to wit, rapid advances in dis- tributed-computing technology are creating new opportunities for industries to use infor- mation technology to enhance productivity. Given that this thesis is widely accepted among the IT community, these two books come at a very opportune time and serve a very useful pur- pose. They are targeted at IS professionals and students. There is a proliferation of distributed computing technologies that, in their marketing hype at least, promise the moon, with the stars thrown in as a bonus. Object Oriented Client/Server Internet Environments helps us understand the reality behind the hype. It provides a nice overview of present-day distributed computing from the IS standpoint. It focuses on middleware, introduces the reader to the basics of the client- server model, and has detailed information on technologies such as Corba, ActiveX, and mid- dleware for SQL and distributed transaction pro- cessing. This book also has a chapter on how the Web fits in, which familiarizes the reader with the basics of HTTP, HTML, Java, and so on. The chapters for the most part provide a good introduction, present the right amount of detail, and include adequate references. Application (Re) Engineering: Building Web-