IBM’s System Application Architecture (SAA) is a strategy to tie together micros, minis, and mainframes with a common user interface, common communication services, and a common software development environment, forming a uniform IBM information processing environment. The 11 chapters of this book cover topics such as “SAA Components,” “IBM SAA Directions,” “Cooperative Processing,” “Distributive Processing,” “Application Development,” “SAA and UNIX,” and “The Future Direction of SAA.” The author is the director of IBM’s SAA marketing strategy and does not pretend to any objectivity in his report on SAA. The intended audience for the book seems to be potential SAA customers in nontechnical management positions. The author provides little technical material on SAA, and he gives little insight into the management and organization of such a project. Although he makes some mention of criticisms of SAA, this book is essentially an expanded marketing brochure. Even for marketing material it is a little padded: the 204 pages include 77 pages of figures and 47 pages of references, appendices, glossary, and index. Although the writing is clear and relatively error-free, both the text and the graphic material contain a great deal of redundancy.

When I received this book, I had hopes of gaining new information about SAA and its development. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed and cannot recommend it to the <CR> reader.