Peer to peer: collaboration and sharing over the Internet covers a lot of ground in its treatment of peer-to-peer Internet communication. From instant messaging to Internet micropayments, this book presents many technologies and issues of peer-to-peer (P2P) communications that became new buzzwords around 2000. Despite the many excellent qualities of the book, it suffers from one inherent and unavoidable drawback: peer-to-peer technology has evolved significantly since the book was published in mid-2002.

Three parts make up this book. The first part introduces P2P communications and many relevant concepts. Peer models and architectures are discussed in chapter 2. Chapter 3 presents such aspects of peer-to-peer networking as search methods and content management, which are of particular relevance to many wildly popular file-swapping architectures. Legal issues concerning the use of P2P applications are discussed in chapter 4. This is where this book really shows how dated the material is. A lot has changed in this area since the book was published, and probably even more changes have taken place within the period between writing this review and its publication.

Part 2 of the book is dedicated to peer-to-peer solutions, and provides a detailed treatment of applications for instant messaging, content sharing, distribution of content, and collaborative spaces. Discussions of general issues, such as scalability and persistency, are scattered throughout the five chapters of this section. Part 3 concludes the book with case studies and discussions of the future of P2P technology.

A comprehensive treatment of this innovative, but somewhat controversial area of networking is provided in the book. It takes a snapshot of P2P communication technology circa early-2002. It does an excellent job of that. However, the book is destined to become obsolete possibly faster than other networking books, due to its extremely quickly evolving subject matter.