I'm starting to get some questions from people who are interested in taking CS462 in the Fall. CS462 is a class on large scale distributed systems that I teach at Brigham Young University. Here's information on when the course meets and the texts I've selected:

The class will have three main sections: one on 2-tier architectures, one on n-tier architectures, and one on Web services. There is, unfortunately, no one text that can cover all of these, so there are three. All are required.

• MySQL and JSP Web Applications by James Turner will be used to study 2-tier architectures. In a perfect world, we'd use PHP instead of JSP for this part, but I want to keep the course about the architectures and not about learning a lot of languages.
  
• Enterprise JavaBeans (3rd Edition) by Richard Monson-Haefel will be used to study n-tier architectures. The largest project in the course will occur in this section of the course and involve installing and programming a EJB application server and linking it to a JSP-based presentaiton layer to create a significant web application.
  
• Java and SOAP by Robert Englander will be used to introduce Web services and the concept of "decentralized" as opposed to merely "distributed" architectures.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.