New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2001. This important resource presents the current state of the art in the application of formal methods to object based distributed systems. A major theme is how to formally handle the new requirements arising from OO distributed systems. The major specification notations and modeling techniques are introduced and compared by leading researchers, in several cases, the inventors of the notations. Professionals in software design, object-oriented computing, distributed systems, and telecommunications systems will gain an appreciation of the relationships among the major areas of concerns and learn how the use of object-oriented based formal methods provides workable solutions.