This invaluable text provides a complete, clear, systematic, and practical understanding of the technologies that enable the Grid. The authors outline all the components necessary to create a Grid infrastructure that enables support for a range of wide-area distributed applications. The Grid: Core Technologies takes a pragmatic approach with numerous practical examples of software in context. It describes the middleware components of the Grid step-by-step, and gives hands-on advice on designing and building a Grid environment with the Globus Toolkit, as well as writing applications.

The Grid: Core Technologies:

Provides a solid and up-to-date introduction to the technologies that underpin the Grid.
Contains a systematic explanation of the Grid, including its infrastructure, basic services, job management, user interaction, and applications.
Explains in detail OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture), Web Services technologies (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), and Grid Monitoring.
Covers Web portal-based tools such as the Java CoG, GridPort, GridSphere, and JSR 168 Portlets.
Tackles hot topics such as WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework), the Semantic Grid, the Grid Security Infrastructure, and Workflow systems.
Offers practical examples to enhance the understanding and use of Grid components and the associated tools.

This rich resource will be essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students in computing and engineering departments, IT professionals in distributed computing, as well as Grid end users such as physicists, statisticians, biologists and chemists.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 2 reviews)

Absolute waste of time and money

This is, perhaps, the most useless computer-related book that I have read. There is no target audience. The book is useless for sysadmins and programmers, because it does not give any technical details and has no novelties. It is useless for managers, because it is very dry and, basically, provides an overwhelming list of all variations of the technologies known to the authors, including definitions of web-services, public and private key authentication, etc. I failed to understand the purpose of this book except for making easy money.
On top of that, the book has horrendous illustrations. They are low resolution, sometimes blurry, screen dumps of some diagrams. Furthermore, because the original images were in color, the authors did not have to think about contrast and object separation. The book is printed in b&w, so all colors are reduced to shades of grey. And because no one had thought about the contrast, objects are indistinguishable, and black print on dark grey background is illegible.
My advice: stay away from this book, save yourself time, money and good mood.
July 23, 2008

A good textbook in Grid Technology

I like it because rather than a composition of articles, the book provides a systematic insight into grid technologies.
April 26, 2006

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