Articles By Richard Monson-Haefel

Top 8 Architecture Tips for Distributed Computing
Richard Monson-Haefel presents this collection of architectural tips derived from years of experience as a distributed computing architect. While its not an exhaustive list, it does address some of the more common mistakes made by organizations.

Enterprise JavaBeans in a Nutshell
This exclusive article by Richard Monson-Haefel provides an extremely succinct overview of Enterprise JavaBeans (version 2.0) and is intended for developers and managers who are not familiar with EJB but have some background in distributed object technologies.

Richard Monson-Haefel's Highly Recommended Books

Principles of Transaction Processing
This book is an excellent introduction to transaction processing, a subject with which middleware professionals should be intimately familiar. In the world of transaction processing this is one of the most read and respected books on the subject.

The Design of the Unix Operating System 
This is a great book for obtaining a conceptual understanding of how operating systems work. It's a masterpiece of technical literature. The writing easy to follow and guides you effortlessly through the most complex aspects of the Unix operating system. Written in 1986, this book remains cutting edge and totally relevant. Reportedly, Linus Torvalds used this book as a guide (along with MINIX) when developing the Linux operating system in 1991.

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 : The Protocols
This is a complete guide to TCP/IP and other Internet protocols.  As a middleware professional it behooves you to understand the communications protocols your middleware uses.

Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis
An excellent overview of Microsoft's .NET platform for distributed computing.  Architects and developers who want to be well rounded should read this book.

Design Patterns
Most developers claim to experience an epiphany reading this book.  If you've never read the Design Patterns book then you have suffered a very serious gap in your programming education that should be remedied immediately.

Garbage Collection : Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management
Garbage collection is one of those topics that everyone seems to know about, but few Java developers really understand. This book is so well written and easy to understand its worth buying it even you only read the first two chapters.

Interesting Books

Distributed Systems: Concepts and Designs
This book provides an overview of several aspects of distributed computing including distributed objects, file systems, naming services, transactions, shared memory, and more.  While it's not comprehensive - that would require several volumes - it's is an excellent resource for learning about distributed computing in general.

Peer to Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies
This book provides a survey of prominent peer-to-peer technologies such as Gnutella, Freenet, SETI@home, Jabber, Publius and the like.  Each chapter is written by different experts who know their topics well, but write with varying proficiency.  The end result is no master piece but it's defiantly worth reading.  Interestingly, a couple of these p-to-p companies have already gone out of business with the collapse of the "new economy".

In Search of Clusters, Second Edition
While the writing style is a bit odd, this book is very easy to read and covers the complete spectrum of clustering strategies and architectures. You can't call yourself a middleware professional if you don't understand clustering.

JavaSpaces(TM) Principles, Patterns and Practice
Middleware takes on many forms and one of the most unusual is tuple spaces.  JavaSpaces is based on this paradigm and it makes for an interesting investigation into one of the less understood distributed-object technologies.