I took a university class on distributed programming this year that required this book. I found it a great introduction and even a comprehensive overview of COM, RMI, and especially CORBA. However, if you're looking for code examples and step-by-step howto using a particular language, you won't find much of it in this book. Distributed programming concepts are covered quite extensively, but one of the core fundamental principles of distributed programming is heterogeneity, both hardware and software. Thus, this books takes a more abstract view of distributed programming than a "Here's how to do it in Java..." or "Here's how to do it in C++..."