In todays world, services and data are integrated in ever new constellations, requiring the flexible and scalable integration of autonomous, heterogeneous components into complex systems at any time. This book provides an in-depth description of event-based systems, covering topics ranging from a treatment of local event matching and distributed event forwarding algorithms, through a more practical discussion of software engineering issues raised by the event-based style, to a presentation of state-of-the-art research in event-based systems like composite event detection and security. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the area, with many hints for future research. In addition, they show the power of event-based architectures in modern system design, encouraging professionals to exploit this technique in next generation large-scale distributed applications like information dissemination, network monitoring, enterprise application integration, or mobile systems.