Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are becoming an established part of the Internet, attracting millions of users. Internet traffic generated by P2P systems already exceeds regular Web traffic. The popularity of early file-sharing systems like Napster and Gnutella has fueled academic research. While the attention that the early systems received was mainly because of copyright issues, new systems present new distributed processing paradigms. The P2P concept is emerging as an important design pattern for scalable future applications, system components, and infrastructural services.

The enormous amount of activity in this field has generated a large body of knowledge. This knowledge, accumulated from active academic research in systems, networking, and theory, as well as from actual experience with deployed systems, has little structure. This book provides up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of P2P technologies. The book covers topics such as structured and unstructured P2P systems, the self-organizing property of these systems, performance evaluation, and business applications.

Although each chapter is written by different authors, the editors manage to establish a clear structure for this body of knowledge. The 32 chapters of the book, covering most aspects of P2P systems, are grouped into ten parts. Each of the ten parts addresses a major subtopic. This organization allows the reader to pick a relevant subject without having to read the whole book. This makes the book a useful handbook for researchers, students, and practitioners.

In summary, the book is highly recommended, both as a text for a graduate-level course, and as a survey for researchers who want to work in the field. It can also be used as a handbook for practitioners looking for a source of material and references for developing P2P systems.