Ian Taylor is jointly a member of the faculty at Computer Science at
Cardiff University, UK and an assistant professor at the Center for Computation and Technology and Computer Science departments in Louisiana State University. Ian also works part-time as a contract programmer and has worked
on several projects, ranging from digital audio to sensor networking, in the UK and the USA.
From P2P to Web services and Grids is Ian's first published book but not his last ... He decided to write the book after collecting around 80 pages of notes for his Distributed Systems course at Cardiff. He submitted a book proposal to Springer Verlag in May 2003 and it was accepted for publication soon after. Ian then decided to take a break away from his responsibilities in order to write the book. So, using the Ryanair flight giveaway offer he randomly chose a country (which happened to be Italy, Sicily in fact) in the winter of 2003. He reformatted/rewrote the orignal 80 pages and then write another 120 in a little less than three weeks and still managed to see some sights ...
For more information, see his home page or his company Web site.