'This book offers a comprehensive journey across the Peer-to-Peer paradigm. William J. Yeager and Rita Yu Chen guide the readers through the challenges, design choices, performance bottlenecks and security issues that people seriously thinking about scalable and reliable Internet applications must face, at least once in their lifetime. The book is packed with ideas and solutions to engineer and develop successful Peer-to-Peer applications, such as how to deal with lookup operations, the access to and control of resources, privacy and security guarantees, network address translation, and the ubiquitous wireless connectivity. With the aid of an ad-hoc programming language (i.e., the 4PL P2P Pseudo Programming Language), William and Rita implore the reader to dive into code and join them in the development phase. This has real value both for a student and an experienced engineer. William and Rita are renowned pioneers and experts of the networking/computing industry and offer their knowledge, wisdom and, sometimes, unconventional perspectives, on the recent history of the Internet. All in all, Next Generation Peer-to-Peer Engineering: Mediating Computing on the Edge is a very solid and delightful read, especially for network practitioners. However, this book should not be reduced to a technical essay. In fact, I believe that its main merit is to make readers aware that freedom can unexpectedly become incarnate even through a functional paradigm.'Luca CaviglioneSenior Research Scientist at the National Research Council of Italy