Book excerpt: The Systems Development Handbook provides practical guidance for the range of new applications problems, featuring contributions from many industry experts. The book provides step-by-step charts, tables, schematics, and a comprehensive index for easy access to topics and areas of related interest. Topics include cooperative processing; the transition to object-oriented development; rapid application development tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs); database architecture in distributed computing; development tools and techniques, including design, measurement, and production; and more.