The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to ordinary users. While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise. Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical, you name it. This book presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of peer-to-peer from leaders of the field:

• Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund of

• target="new">Popular Power, on a history of peer-to-peer

• Clay Shirky of acceleratorgroup, on where peer-to-peer is likely to be headed

• Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, on redefining the public's perceptions

• Dan Bricklin, cocreator of Visicalc, on harvesting information from end-users

• David Anderson of SETI@home, on how SETI@Home created the world's largest computer

• Jeremie Miller of Jabber, on the Internet as a collection of conversations

• Gene Kan of Gnutella and GoneSilent.com, on lessons from Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies

• Adam Langley of Freenet, on Freenet's present and upcoming architecture

• Alan Brown of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content distribution system

• Marc Waldman, Lorrie Cranor, and Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs, on the Publius project and trust in distributed systems

• Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, and David Molnar of Free Haven, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed systems

• Rael Dornfest of O'Reilly Network and Dan Brickley of ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata

• Theodore Hong of Freenet, on performance

• Richard Lethin of Reputation Technologies, on how reputation can be built online

• Jon Udell of BYTE and Nimisha Asthagiri and Walter Tuvell of Groove Networks, on security

• Brandon Wiley of Freenet, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems

You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

Excellent coverage of p2p - 2004-03-12
Reviewer Rating:
In 2000, O'Reilly surveyed the field of peer-to-peer computing, and published this book. It has an excellent description of the key concepts behind all the major p2p implementations then existing. Napster, of course, was the best known. But Seti@home, Gnutella, Jabber, Freenet, Free Haven and others are also explained. These are compared with each other, so that you can see the different emphases and strengths of each.

Since the book's release, p2p usage has grown, and the attendant controversy about the downloading of copyrighted material, mainly music, has continued unabated. Napster in its original incarnation has gone. But other p2p networks, like Kazaa, have arisen.

Another type of p2p network has also emerged - for social networks. Companies include Friendster, Tribe.net, Ryze and others. Of course, these aren't covered in the book, because they did not exist when it was written. But as a measure of how comprehensive the book is, one of its chapters describes the key work on social networks and encompasses this entire group of companies.

The technical level is moderate throughout the book. While XML, SOAP and cryptography are described, you only need slight familiarity with these topics. The discussion involving them tends to be at a higher level of usage.

dasper - 2002-07-25
Reviewer Rating:
I've been a big fan of O'Reilly & Associates for years because of their consistent ability to provide highly readable and accurate technical books, often about technologies I find fascinating and useful. To me the editorial bias of most of those books is simply the love of the technology they describe. But O'Reilly has increasingly become a force in the organization and direction of new technologies. And it is that aspect of this book on P2P which has made the biggest impression on me. This book is different from the many other O'Reilly books I've read because it discusses the publisher's own ideas about P2P and involvement with it.

A Great Summary - 2001-12-13
Reviewer Rating:
This book provides a great summary of current P2P projects and the technologies used. It is non-technical book that would be a great intro to P2P, especially for "suits" who only think of Napster when you mention the word P2P. There are loads of gems in this text; I recommend this book to any computer enthusiast.

The chapters start out strong, but I lost interest in a few of latter chapters, which tend to be a little redundant. There seemed to be a little too much emphasis on decentralized systems and anonymous file sharing. A few chapters appear to focus on broad topics but actually focus on the particular author's project. For Example, the security chapter was more or less an overview of grove networks. Another characteristic of this text is the fact that its basically 19 separate papers rolled in to one book so don't expect it to flow.

Still the best overview I know of - 2005-09-21
Reviewer Rating:
It's five years old by now, which is a long time in this industry, but the book remains relevant by virtue of the solid writing and lack of fluff that we expect from O'Reilly, and by the third section's excellent in-depth coverage of fundamental issues: Performance, Trust, Accountability, Reputation, Security. Each of these has a lot of valuable information, references and ideas.

Particularly valuable to me were the discussions of:
- Analyzing and optimizing peer connection graphs
- How Groove uses cryptography to protect and authenticate data
- Using token economies and "nonfungible micropayments" to avoid denial-of-service attacks
- How trust relationships can be tracked

The coverage of specific technologies hasn't aged quite as well. There's too much on things that either never went anywhere (Red Rover?) or are extremely primitive by today's standards (Gnutella), while very important more recent ones like BitTorrent and Kademlia are understandably missing.

Still, as I said, I don't think there's a better book out there. I've bought others and been disappointed by their superficiality, even the "academic" books. Buy this one, and then be prepared to do some intensive web searching/surfing for research papers to catch up on later developments like Distributed Hash Tables, BitTorrent, Kademlia, Chord, Pastry, Coral, JXTA, PNRP, Bonjour...

This book changed my life - 2005-11-22
Reviewer Rating:
I work in the MP3 player industry, so the title of my review is only a slight exaggeration. P2P technology created the MP3 revolution. This book takes an honest look back at where P2P came from and where it is going from several different viewpoints. I think it is a must-read for anyone working on the future architecture of computing technology. And it is just plain interesting if you are sitting on the sidelines--and you might just find a role you can play in the game.

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