Li (electronics and computer engineering, Brunel University, UK) and Baker (distributed systems, University of Portsmouth, UK) offer an understanding of the technologies that enable the Grid infrastructure and its support of wide-area distributed applications. They describe the middleware components of the Grid, and give advice on writing applications and designing and building a Grid environment with the Globus Toolkit. The audience for the book includes researchers and postgraduate students in computing and engineering departments, IT professionals in distributed computing, and Grid end users such as physicists, biologists, and chemists.