Very good. Oracle is trying to respond to the increasing use of 'cloud computing'. As the opening chapter acknowledges, the attractions include elastic provisioning, where the user [typically a company] pays only for the actual use, while the data center is refactored out and run by others. Note that the use of 'public cloud' certainly does not mean free or run by a non-profit organisation. Public is short for publicly available. The layers of the Oracle cloud architecture are summarised in a diagram in the text. Much of this is generic to any cloud provider, like Amazon. But here there is a natural emphasis on the Oracle products. Mainly Solaris, Oracle's linux version and the Oracle database servers. Plus also a java service. The entire book is basically a white paper (technical document) explaining Oracle's offering. Readers who might have already used Amazon Web Service will see much familiar. With a natural difference being that Amazon offers the free SQL databases, while Oracle gravitates towards support of its 11g version. The book bills itself as a starting guide. So it is somewhat unfair to compare this against the full panoply of AWS, which is really the default giant in public clouds. This being said, I do hope there is more to Oracle Public Cloud than presented here. AWS has made great strides in also supporting a distributed geographic redundancy and in having a nice GUI for a new user, for example. The screen captures in the book only convey limited comparative ability.