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Designing and Implementing Computer Workgroups, by Robert Lucke, is for information services managers and system administrators confronted with erecting and maintaining those byzantine latticeworks that Microsoft has taught us to call "workgroups." The IS department is today confronted with a sea of servers and umpteen-to-the-nth clients, each with their own particular requirements, licensing monitoring, network connectivity and special protocol support. The book's concern is reaching order instead of the chaos that so often prevails in this arrangement.
Lucke is a senior technical consultant with Hewlett-Packard's Technical Solutions consulting team. That and the publisher should be enough to advise the reader that what we have here is a bit of an infomercial. If the message is still too subtle, the servers in the photographic illustrations are HP units.
Nonetheless, the book is meaty and touches all bases from LAN to WAN, including esoterica such as DCE and CORBA as viewed from the perspective of the hands that must guard uptime. Effectively, the book is a genuine tour-de-force of the modern corporate LAN and its relationship to the corporate WAN.
Designing and Implementing Computer Workgroups certainly devotes due attention to Wintel but is hardly Wintel-centric and is very much focused on the interoperation of the Wintel desktop with the UNIX upper end. The author's professionalism and intimate familiarity with the parameters of the problem domain make this book a worthwhile read for the target audience of admins and managers, while the excellence of editing and publishing make it a weighty but pleasant read.
-- Jack Woehr
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.