Doug Holland's Blog

Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online by Michael Miller is an excellent introduction to this phenomenon within the software industry. Written using a style that takes the reader on a gentle journey through a "brief history of computing," explaining where we have been and why we'll be living and working in the clouds in our future, the book is an excellent introduction.

The book is not a deep technical book on cloud-based architectures and how to implement those architectures using .NET or J2EE technologies, if you're looking for that then I would still recommend reading this book and then finding a more technical treatise somewhere else.

Every few years there seems to be a new buzz word within our industry, or more accurately, a myriad of new buzz words. As a software architect the buzz over the last few years has been around Service Orientated Architecture although the buzz more recently seems to involve Clouds.

• Book Review: The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr