In today's 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.