Addison Wesley, 2000. - 784 Pages.
The network is everywhere. At the office, machines are wired together into local area networks, and the local networks are interconnected via the Internet. At home, personal computers are intermittently connected to the Internet or, increasingly, via "always-on" cable and DSL modems. New wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, promise to vastly expand the network realm, embracing everything from cell phones to kitchen appliances.
Such an environment creates tremendous opportunities for innovation. Whole new classes of applications are now predicated on the availability of high-bandwidth, always-on connectivity. Interactive games allow players from around the globe to compete on virtual playing fields and the instant messaging protocols let them broadcast news of their triumphs to their friends. New peer-to-peer systems, such as Napster and Gnutella, allow people to directly exchange MP3 audio files and other types of digital content. The SETI@Home project takes advantage of idle time on the millions of personal computers around the world to search for signs of extraterrestrial life in a vast collection of cosmic noise.
The ubiquity of the network allows for more earthbound applications as well. With the right knowledge, you can write a robot that will fetch and summarize prices from competitors' Web sites; a script to page you when a certain stock drops below a specified level; a program to generate daily management reports and send them off via e-mail; a server that centralizes some number-crunching task on a single high-powered machine, or alternatively distributes that task among the multiple nodes of a computer cluster.