Lots of important concepts that sometimes can be somewhat confusing are deeply reviewed, including all types of caching schemes and backing maps, and the cache topologies with their corresponding performances and very useful "When to use it?" sections.

Some functionalities that are very desirable or used a lot are reviewed with examples and best practices of implementation, including:

• Data affinity
• Querying
• Pagination
• Indexes
• Aggregations
• Event processing, listening and triggering
• Data persistence
• Security

Regarding the networking and architecture topics, Coherence*Extend is exhaustively reviewed, including C++ and .NET clients, with very good tips and examples, even including source codes. Personally, I am also glad to see that the address providers (<address-provider> tag), new feature in Coherence 3.5 which is a way to programmatically provide well-known addresses in order to connect to the cluster, is mentioned on the book, because it provides new functionalities to satisfy some special configuration requirements for example:

• Provide a way to switch extend nodes in cases of failure
• Implement custom load balancing algorithms and/or dynamic discovery of TCP/IP connection acceptors
• Dynamically assign TCP address and port settings when binding to a server socket

Another very interesting and useful section is the "Coherent Bank Sample Application", which is a great tutorial, useful to understand how Coherence interacts with third party products establishing a clear integration with them, including the use of non-Oracle products like MS Visual Studio.