Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

"IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems" by Chris Britton (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-70907-4) is a book, which focuses on the high level aspects of middleware. This is somewhat unique as most books tend to focus on the low-level details. Here we have a book that IT managers can read to get enough knowledge to understand what their developers are doing. Also, developers can read this book to get an overview of the issues and options in the enterprise computing world.

The book starts off with talking about the current problems in IT Architecture. Then it spends three chapters going over the history of middleware technology. All of this brings us up to the present day.

Two chapters follow that explain what middleware is and what you use it for. Then most of the rest of the book focuses on individual aspects of middleware, such as resiliency and security. The book ends with a chapter about how you run a middleware project.

The nice thing about this book is that it is a relatively light read, but at the same time, is very informative. I would recommend it to IT Managers or others, who want a nice overview of the Middleware world.