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System administrators are users of what developers write, thus they are one level lower than developers. Similar to that, software engineers are one level higher than developers. Developers are users of what software engineers produce: compilers, runtimes, developer toolkits and frameworks. This book is for software engineers.
Guido van Rossum read this book once in a blue moon, and it inspired him to make a class system in Python. One can see mentions of this book in Python's history of creation. This book is also mentioned in most articles about metaclasses. And other books about metaclasses often refer to Python's metaclasses which were inspired by this book. Wherever you go, you return to this book.
This is because something better still waits for being created. Remember, software engineering is level higher than development. It does not matter if someone developed lots of things over the past 15 years. Mere development does not advance software engineering.
Both authors were involved in development and engineering of IBM SOMObjects Developers Toolkit. Suddenly in the end of 90s every OS that used to be a platform for SOM was abandoned. SOM was mostly used in IBM OS/2, Apple Mac OS Classic and Apple Copland. SOM 3.0 was also publicly available for AIX and even WinNT!
If only developers and software engineers (open source ones in the first order) of that time had a broader knowledge of technologies, abandomnent of OS/2 and Copland won't affect SOM that much. SOM did not seem to get into their view, and things like GNU GObject are designed without SOM in mind, and are worse.
We can't change the past, but in order to move into the future we must continue from the place where we stopped. It includes understanding SOM, and this book will help much. Or, if you're not going to change the world, you can at least get a better understanding of what are metaclasses. Many programming languages like SmallTalk, Objective-C, Java, Delphi, Common Lisp (with CLOS) actually provide some kind of metaclasses, but this facility is either cloudy or underpowered compared to SOM.
In Java, all class methods are glued to classes by syntax sugar. Class objects do not support class methods in the same way as objects support object methods. In Delphi, hierarchy of classes is mirrored by disjoint anonymous hierarchy of implicit metaclasses. Every class X has a corresponding "class of X" metaclass, but TClass cannot be casted to TObject. In SOM, SmallTalk, CLOS, Objective-C, class objects are real objects, and class methods are methods of class objects.
However, despite Objective-C runtime API provides an option to specifiy a metaclass when creating a new class, this feature cannot be easily used. Classes and metaclasses are mostly being created in pairs like they do in Delphi, and using metaclasses any other way is tricky and troublesome. One is going sooner or later to face problems that SOM solves. CLOS comes most close to providing explicit control over metaclasses, but it suffers from metaclass incompatibility problem, which is solved in SOM.
The book contains comparison with another object models. SOM was not the only object model implementation, but it solved another problem of release-to-release binary compatibility. This book also contains comparison with Objective-C, Java, CLOS and several other technologies you are not likely to heard of e. g. Sun OBI, Delta/C++ from this point of view.
Importand note: this book should have an attached floppy or CD. An attachment contains simulation of object technology described in this book and several excersizes being solved on top of this simulation. However, this book contains neither CD nor floppy. Instead, it was told to download simulation from publisher's website. By Murphy's law URL no longer works. Addison Wesley Longman seems to be bought by InformIT, and there is no simulation "putting.zip" on their website. Thanks to Time Machine it was possible to rescue this precious attachment.
