ABOUT BOOK

In this book, you will learn about all three kinds of interaction. In all three cases, interesting software techniques are needed in order to bring the computations into contact, yet keep them suffciently at arm's length that they don't compromise each other's reliability. The exciting challenge, then, is supporting controlled interaction. This includes support for computations that share a single computer and interact with one another, as your email and word processing programs do. It also includes support for data storage and network communication. This book describes how all these kinds of support are provided both by operating systems and by additional software layered on top of operating systems, which is known as middleware.