[Beowulf] Parallel Programming with MPI, anyone read the book?

[Kyle Spaans]

I've found this Mogran Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. book by Peter S.
Pacheco in my University's Computational Mathematics Club. It's (c)
1997, but I figure it should still be mostly relevant.
Has anyone else read this, and/or have some comments on it's
validity/applicability?

So far, the only thing I've been disappointed with is this sole
reference to Beowulfery that I could find in Chapter 2, under the
headings Distributed Memory MIMD, and "Bus-based Networks" where they
say:

"The last, and probably the simplest, network is a bus. A cluster of
workstations on an ethernet provides a popular example. Of course,
busses tend to be fairly slow, and even worse, busses, especially
ethernets, soon become saturated if there are more than a few nodes or
more than absolutely minimal communication. Thus, although they are
very useful for program development, currently available bus-based
system don't show much promise for very large-scale applications."


This paragraph sounds a little dated to me. Isn't Ethernet more
prevalent than that?