Peer to Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies by Andy Oram

Peer-to-Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive TechnologiesbyAndy Oram

Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (March 15, 2001) | ISBN-10: 059600110X | PDF | 2,1 Mb | 448 pages

The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks thatexpect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, orother resources to some shared project. Even more interesting thanthe systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptivepotential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control toordinary users.While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, wealso talk about its exciting social promise.Communities have been formingon the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flatinteractive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchangerecommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficultycommenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performingsearches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organizeinformation intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her owndata and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would takeoff. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost anygroup of people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical,you name it.This book presents the goals that drive the developers of thebest-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and thetechnical solutions they've found.Learn here the essentials ofpeer-to-peer from leaders of the field: