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Introduction : 1.3 Organization of this Book
Copyright © 2003-2008 ZeroC, Inc.

1.3 Organization of this Book

This book is divided into four parts and a number of appendixes:
• "Part I: Ice Overview" provides an overview of the features offered by Ice and explains the Ice object model. After reading this part, you will understand the major features and architecture of the Ice platform, its object model and request dispatch model, and know the basic steps required to build a simple application in C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, Python, and Ruby.
• "Part II: Slice" explains the Slice definition language. After reading this part, you will have detailed knowledge of how to specify interfaces and types for a distributed application.
• "Part III: Language Mappings" contains a sub-part for each of the language mappings. After reading the relevant sub-part, you will know how to implement an application in your language of choice.
• "Part IV: Advanced Ice" presents many Ice features in detail and covers advanced aspects of server development, such as properties, threading, object life cycle, object location, persistence, and asynchronous as well as dynamic method invocation and dispatch. After reading this part, you will understand the advanced features of Ice and how to effectively use them to find the correct trade-off between performance and resource consumption as appropriate for your application requirements.
• "Part V: Ice Services" covers the services provided with Ice, such as IceGrid (a sophisticated deployment tool), Glacier2 (the Ice firewall solution), IceStorm (the Ice messaging service), and IcePatch2 (a software patching service).1
• The Appendixes contain Ice reference material.
Note: This entire manual is also available online as a set of HTML pages at http://www.zeroc.com/doc/3.3.0/manual.
You can always find the latest version of the manual at http://www.zeroc.com/Ice‑Manual.html.
In addition, you can find an online reference of all the Slice APIs that are used by Ice and its services at http://www.zeroc.com/doc/3.3.0/reference.
You can always find the latest version of this reference at http://www.zeroc.com/Slice‑Reference.html.

1
If you notice a certain commonality in the theme of naming Ice features, it just goes to show that software developers are still inveterate punsters.

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