Next Generation Peer-to-Peer Engineering: Mediated Computing on the Edge

This book provides a brief history of peer-to-peer technology in the new millennium, before discussing what it terms the "peer-to-peer spectrum," which expands the idea of what a peer-to-peer network is, beginning with the pure, user-to-user system, and ending with those systems that can include content providers, and Cloud services. The book also clarifies the often-misunderstood notion of a "peer-to-peer overlay network," and notes that this can be implemented either regionally or globally. In addition, given the necessary, in-depth, technical description of the networking preliminaries, security, and protocols required to write a mediated, peer-to-peer system, the book then proceeds to describe in detail such networks and protocols required to implement a complete, mediated peer-to-peer system.

About the Author :
William J. Yeager has 50 years of research and teaching experience. During his twenty years of research at Stanford University, he invented the multiple protocol Internet router that was licensed in 1987 by Cisco Systems, and architected and co-invented the IMAP Internet email protocol. At Sun Microsystems he invented a high-performing IMAP server and was the CTO of the Project JXTA Peer-to-Peer, open-source platform. As a result, he has 20 United States patents in his name, sixteen of which are on Peer-to-Peer Computing and four are on high performing message stores. In 2003, he established the first Internet Research Task Force Peer-to-Peer working group and was the initial chair. During his career he has written software in more than 20 languages.Dr Rita Yu Chen is an accomplished researcher and engineer interested in distributed computing and ubiquitous computing with numerous patents and publications. She is currently a volunteer and freelance mobile software developer working on various private projects. Her open-source contributions to the community include Project JXTA, Poblano, and GnuSpace. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

Review :
'This book offers a comprehensive journey across the Peer-to-Peer paradigm. William J. Yeager and Rita Yu Chen guide the readers through the challenges, design choices, performance bottlenecks and security issues that people seriously thinking about scalable and reliable Internet applications must face, at least once in their lifetime. The book is packed with ideas and solutions to engineer and develop successful Peer-to-Peer applications, such as how to deal with lookup operations, the access to and control of resources, privacy and security guarantees, network address translation, and the ubiquitous wireless connectivity. With the aid of an ad-hoc programming language (i.e., the 4PL – P2P Pseudo Programming Language), William and Rita implore the reader to dive into code and join them in the development phase. This has real value both for a student and an experienced engineer. William and Rita are renowned pioneers and experts of the networking/computing industry and offer their knowledge, wisdom and, sometimes, unconventional perspectives, on the recent history of the Internet. All in all, Next Generation Peer-to-Peer Engineering: Mediating Computing on the Edge is a very solid and delightful read, especially for network practitioners. However, this book should not be reduced to a technical essay. In fact, I believe that its main merit is to make readers aware that freedom can unexpectedly become incarnate even through a functional paradigm.'Luca CaviglioneSenior Research Scientist at the National Research Council of Italy