"Grid Computing for Developers" hits the shelves ...

For enterprise software engineers that want to cut their teeth on Grid computing development, a new release by Charles River Media, Inc. "Grid Computing for Developers" might be worth taking a look at.

Author Vladimir Silva is a former IBM software engineer with deep technical experience with the IBM Grid Toolbox and the Globus Toolkit. His book drills beyond conceptual Grid architecture discussions -- and provides a companion's guide (with code samples) for common Grid installation, security set-up and integration scenarios.

Silva notes that the enterprise is still in the early exploration days in terms of Grid-enabling core business applications -- but "Grid Computing for Developers" does provide some specific technical drill-downs on Grid services running in more 'mainstream' commercial types of environments. For example, in the "Security" section (Chapter 8), Silva describes how a certificate authority works with a Web-based application "along with command-line tools and installation transcripts for two popular application servers: Apache Tomcat and IBM WebSphere."

While the book went to publication prior to the release of GT4 (and therefore emphasizes best development practices around GT3), 'Grid Development for Developers' stands out as one of the first Grid publications that gives the enterprise developer a technical point of reference as they actually role up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with some of the core open source Grid plumbing in common use today in research and science Grids.