Book Report

The book I chose to read and do a book report on was on Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online by Michael Miller. This book primarily focuses on some of the most popular web-based applications used today. Basically, “Cloud Computing” is a term often used to those applications which are not desktop-based but instead web-based. The “cloud” meaning somewhere within the World Wide Web. That something, of course, is made up of servers, databases, and computers. When we talk about web-based applications, we talk about those applications which we usually use an internet browser to use. Such applications most of us use are the popular email-based services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail. Applications such as these can be run on any computer and can be accessed by anyone anywhere. The book now refers these applications as cloud-based applications. The book gives a good history and understanding about cloud computing. It also covers many of the frequently used cloud-based applications such as Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Adobe Photoshop Express, and Apple MobileMe to name a few.

This book would be great for anyone interested to learn more about any of the web-based applications frequently used today and to understand and learn how these cloud-based applications are being used and how it affects the way we interact with one another. It also gives some great tips and advice for you to start using cloud computing to benefit you. I personally found this book to be very insightful and useful. I learned so many different web-based applications from reading this book. Many of which I had never used before and some that I never had heard of before. Overall, it was a very enjoyable read and I would definitely recommend it to others.

Some of the strong points of this book were just the pure amount of information presented regarding Cloud Computing and the variety of cloud-based applications introduced to you in this book. Even a novice would understand and be able to use many of these applications after he/she has read this book. It is presented in a fairly simple manner and is generally easy to understand. They are also plenty of screen shots to give you visual examples as you get introduced to the many different applications available in here. The book is also wonderfully divided up into appropriate parts and chapters. It starts with an introduction where you learn to understand Cloud Computing. Then it goes into how it will help you, which is divided into three sections, one for your family, one for your community, and finally one for the workplace. Then it goes into detail on the various cloud-based applications. Finally, it wraps with a nice section which deals with other services which are web-based, but not strictly cloud-based such peer-to-peer services like instant messaging. The only real weak point I found was it talked about a lot of not so famous applications and how to use them. While it is good to give different examples of the applications available, I think here the author has gone a little too far and has given too many different examples to the user. One would begin to wonder how someone could have enough time to use so many different types of applications! However, this is a really good book overall and is definitely something to check out if you are really interested in this stuff. I give it a B+ rating.