"The Jiro Technology Programmer's Guide and Federated Management Architecture" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-72897-4) by Monday and Connor is a book that was right up my alley. The company I worked for these days, Tek-Tools, is developing a storage management application primarily in Java. Jiro is designed to be a framework for storage management applications in Java. A perfect fit.

The problem to date with Jiro according to me to and a few other people I know is that the Jiro web site is not really helpful. A few days before the book showed up I asked why we were not using Jiro and the basic answer was that it was hard to understand exactly what the technology did. I tried my hand at reading what was available on it and came to the same conclusion.

Then this book showed up. I started reading it. It started off by giving a good overview of the problems of the storage management arena. After that, it just right into the details of Jiro, which it covers well. What I felt was missing was a chapter on explaining how Jiro addresses the problems of storage management. I felt like I got the high level and the low level with the information to tie to the two together. If I remember right, I had the same difficulty with Paul Monday's book on the San Francisco framework as well.

About this time, I was going on vacation. I gave the book to our CTO. While I was going he reached a conclusion, he told me that he read the first three chapters and some information from some management facade vendors (e.g. Veritas) and now knew whether or not to use the technology.

Where does that leave me for a conclusion to the review? I guess I will answer with that I found the book inadequate for my needs. However, my CTO managed to get what he needed to from the book. Therefore, my conclusion is that this book works better for some people's learning styles than others. Will it match yours? That's for you to decide.