As global information systems become ever more powerful, complex, and intertwined, companies need new approaches to extracting information, transforming it into intelligence, and acting on it. David Luckham introduces a breakthrough solution that offers compelling benefits at every level and scale of the enterprise: Complex Event Processing (CEP). Luckham first identifies key challenges faced by today's enterprise information systems, and demonstrates the "event-driven" nature of management in the electronic enterprise. He then introduces CEP, showing how it can harness the power of events to automate management without compromising managers' control. Luckham illuminates fundamental concepts such as events, causality, event hierarchies, event patterns, and rules; then shows how these concepts can be used to solve key enterprise management problems. In Part III, he presents a realistic description of what it takes to build CEP applications that scale to real world problems, introducing the new RAPIDE event pattern language. The book concludes with detailed case studies that show Luckham's CEP tools at work in the enterprise.

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The first two chapters give reasons why complex event processing (CEP)is essential to the distributed systems that characterize supply chain, e-commerce and internet-enabled applications. They also sort out the key issues and present a paradigm for a global event cloud that is decomposed in subsequent chapters. Instead of providing an in-depth analysis of each chapter, which would make for a lengthly and boring review I'll give the highlights of what I liked:

- Architecture is an important theme throughout the book. In particular the Rapide architecture description language adds formality and structure. The key elements of Rapide are causal event modeling, event patterns/pattern matching and event pattern maps and constraints.

- Events, timing and causality, and their interrelationships, are thoroughly explained. These are the key to understanding the treatment of patterns, rules and constraints that follow, and for tackling the subsequent discussion of complex events and event hierarchies. This is slow reading, but the essence of the book.

- Event processing networks, which are a practical use of the knowledge imparted by this book. Moreover, the two case studies showed real world application of the concepts instead of abstract theory. They reinforced all of the key points made earlier in the book.

CEP is particularly applicable to enterprise application integration projects that depend on business events and network and systems management instrumentation (especially developers who write Tivoli software adapters, develop network monitoring solutions or similar endeavors).

5 of 5 found the following review helpful:

Surprisingly Easy to ReadJun 10, 2002
By Sunil Bhargava "sunilbhargava"
As IT infrastructure weaves itself into every aspect of a business, managing these systems becomes an imperative. The Lines of Business demand complete and the real time visibility into the IT infrastructure. Most systems developed do not allow the IT departments to manage at these levels. Dr Luckhams book propose a framework for managing this complexity. He puts forth, in a simple and readable manner how do manage systems by observing the "Cloud of Events" and how to build systems that are easier to manage.

It is the first book that I have come across that deals with the topic of IT management at a level that is not too abstract or complete focused on existing tools, instead Dr Luckham takes the reader much closer to a solution to the problem by getting them to think about the problem in the right way. He puts years of Stanford research into a readable form for the ordinary mortal. Bravo.

8 of 10 found the following review helpful:

Finally an IT book with Meat!Dec 11, 2002
By William J. Tracz
If you are like me and you are frustrated after picking up an IT book and only getting superficial platitudes rather than keen insights, then you may be pleasantly surprised by this book because it really reveals, as the title states, the "Power of Events." The book starts off establishing the author's grounding in Enterprise Architectures (and their shortcomings), and then proceeds to build an intuitive foundation to seduce the reader into the world of events that they may not have realized was so much a part of distributed systems. While the formal notation used in the book may appear daunting, it is easily mastered and the subtle rules and mechanism are exposed through many thoughtful examples. I will say the second half of the book is a slower read than the 1st part, but the book should leave you with some confidence that there really are some breakthroughs in software technology that will have a positive impact on distributed IT System quality and the complex event processing shows that potential.

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:

Still a great book on event processing!Mar 05, 2009
By Benjamin
This book is by far the best book on event processing. Sure some of the examples may be contextually old but the concepts still very much apply today. I actually like the dot-com examples because we have all been there and done that so it's easier to see how it could have been done better using events. If you're trying to get your arms around event processing then this book will help a-lot. I highly recommend it.

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