C++ Network Programming, Volume I: Mastering Complexity with ACE and Patterns 1st Edition

Book is in excellent condition.

My husband needed this to further his knowledge at work. Was worth the price and easy to understand for him, anyway

The blurb for this book calls it authoritative. And it is authoritative in the sense that it is written by the people behind ACE. But it is not authoritative in the sense that it isn't a complete reference.As somebody who has written native code for handling Sockets, process management, threading etc on various platforms, then over time integrated OO and patterns to make it easier to use (including across platforms), and slowly worked my way towards what I consider a definitive way of doing things, I find reading this book interesting in that it's like a tick list to which I can go "yeap, I found that too" with just the odd "ooh, actually I would do that differently in this specific situation, but for the general case yes that's how I do it too". So, for me this book is interesting now, but if I was new to ACE (I'm not) or new to the underlying platform APIs I am not so sure how interesting I would find it. It gives more of a taster of what ACE can do than providing a complete tutorial. It gives more of a justification of why ACE does things the way it does rather than provide a complete reference. So, interesting for me now, but I'm really not sure who the book is aimed at. It could be used as one step of a tutorial, giving familiarity of what ACE can do, if not enough detail to really do serious stuff. It could be used to persuade people that it's usually better to use ACE than invest time and money re-inventing the wheel... Otherwise, I just don't know...Is ACE worth using? Most of the time, yes. If you need a book about ACE then this is probably the place to start, but online is the place to find the detailed information that you will need when using it.

I discovered ACE almost two years ago after a coworker told me about it. As a developer in the networking / streaming media / distributed computing space, i've all too often run into the problems that are inherent in developing this sort of software -- scalability, maintainability, not to mention all of those bugs ...ACE makes all of that much easier, and delivers the promise of true reuseability; not just classes, but common behaviors (patterns). This book explains why ACE was needed, the problems it solves, and how to use it. Though it's highly technical, it's not boring or overly verbose -- the problems developing networked apps are presented, and the solution ACE uses as well. Doug and Steve did an amazing job with this ... highly recommended.

In the past, I have seen many posts on newsgroups from folks inquiring as to what *real world* C++ code is available for them to study so that they can learn *real-world* tools and techniques they can understand and thereafter really apply. ACE is such a body of code and this book does an excellent job of presenting what ACE is, what it does, how it does it, and, the part I like the most, WHY it does things the way it does.I work with high performance distributed real-time embedded system factory automation equipment and network-enabled software defined radios. I remember diving into these areas of software for the first time and spending A LOT of time wrestling with the idiosyncrasies of the socket and threading APIs of not just one but a few operating systems. It wasn't until I started using the ACE classes and patterns described in this book that I was able to master these complexities and get on with solving the problem of the business domain for which the software was being written. This book does a great job of giving you not only the view of networked and concurrent applications from 30,000 feet (with the domain analysis of network application development and the resulting isolation of important design dimensions) but also the view from the battlefield trenches (with code that abstracts away the gory details of native operating system APIs) as well as the stuff in between (real life networked concurrent programming examples that bring it all together).After reading the book, I definitely feel I have gained some invaluable experience from the authors' intense expertise with the gory details of and differences between operating system APIs. They explain these details and differences in a very clear fashion and then show how you can program more productively using the ACE classes that abstract away these platform differences, without loss of efficiency, as well as prevent you from making common nasty programming errors that could cost you hundreds of hours of debugging time. They explain, in full, the C++ techniques that ACE uses to achieve this. They explain not only how these techniques work but why they are used. I feel my expertise and judgment as a C++ network/concurrent programmer have increased greatly as a result of reading the book.Despite the complexity of the subject matter, the authors' writing style enables you to absorb and understand the information at a very fast rate. I highly recommend this book for anybody involved with programming (you should know C++) as it captures the essence AND details of how a complex programming domain can be systematically and methodically tackled and a solution formulated and implemented effectively in real-world applications.

The 2nd volume is a complement to the first.The 1st one talks for portable source code and wrapper classes. The second one concentrates on deisgn patterns & all issues in C++ network programming architecture .Again i say dont reinvent the wheel , give ACE a look.

This book provided a decent introduction to ACE. However, language is little terse and presentation is not as good as ACE Programmer's book. I most liked the boxed explanations in the book, this style should have been all over the book.