Explains fault tolerance in clear terms, with concrete examples drawn from real-world settings Highly practical focus aimed at building "mission-critical" networked applications that remain secure

Basic Distributed Computing Technologies.- Fundamentals.- Basic Communication Services.- High Assurance Communication.- Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Model.- Styles of Client/Server Computing.- CORBA: The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.- System Support for Fast Client/Server Communication.- Web Technologies.- The World Wide Web.- Major Web Technologies.- Web Services.- Related Internet Technologies.- Platform Technologies.- Reliable Distributed Computing.- How and Why Computer Systems Fail.- Overcoming Failures in a Distributed System.- Dynamic Membership.- Group Communication Systems.- Point to Point and Multi-group Considerations.- The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model.- Consistency in Distributed Systems.- Applications of Reliability Techniques.- Retrofitting Reliability into Complex Systems.- Software Architectures for Group Communication.- Related Technologies.- Security Options for Distributed Settings.- Clock Synchronization and Synchronous Systems.- Transactional Systems.- Peer-to-Peer Systems and Probabilistic Protocols.- Prospects for Building Highly Assured Web Services.- Other Distributed and Transactional Systems.