Customer Reviews

Enjoying Web Development with Wicket

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought the PDF version of this book. It provided an excellent introduction to Wicket. Wicket is based on a different paradigm (components and events rather than request/response and actions) to most Java web frameworks so the learning curve can be quite steep. This book covered everything I needed to know to really get going with Wicket in a straightforward and easy to understand manner.

I would recommend this book for anyone looking to learn about Wicket.

I bought the PDF version of this book and was really impressed with the down to earth meat and potatoes examples approach that this book uses in getting you up to speed with Wicket really fast.

This book will be more suited to busy corporate developers who will need to get practical answers to how you do common everyday things with Wicket via the numerous working examples and reasonable explanations as to why things work the way they do in Wicket.

The reason I didn't give this book a five is that the section on AJAX needed to be a bit clearer and should have had detailed explanations on the theory behind Wicket's AJAX strategy. I also needed more details on the use of Wicket's AJAX components. The book could also do with a section on creating custom Wicket Components.

You won't find anything on the use of Wicket annotations in this book as it's based on Wicket 1.3. Wicket annotations are available in the more recent Wicket 1.4 release.

Overall, this is a well put together book that is very easy to read and follow.

This book is currently the best among wicket books. The tutorial style will get you going and for someone able to construct the rudimentary examples in the book, the next steps should not be too bad. Dont expect the small apps in the book to be like real life sites. They are simple and are directed towards grasping one or two concepts. Pages filled with summaries could be avoided, no one is taking tests. If you want to learn this framework and you have a lot of java web exposure, this book is for you.

I bought a couple of books on Wicket when I first started learning it, and Enjoying Web Development with Wicket was by far the best one. It is task oriented, and systematically builds up on the development of a web application. If you are already familiar with Java and web technologies, this book will get you very rapidly ramped up on Wicket, and answer your most commonly asked questions as you go along.

This is a "learn by doing" book. Theory is kept to a minimum and all the material is illustrated by tutorial-style examples. The examples are small yet practical enough to be useful in real projects. You may not be a Wicket expert after reading the book, but you will definitely be able to build real-life Wicket projects.

The code examples are very well written. They are easy to understand and contain extremely few mistakes. As a new comer to Wicket with little Java experience, I can actually follow the examples with little difficulties.

The major weakness of this book is also its advantage: lack of theory. You may need to read some more books later to beef up your theoretical understanding. But to jumpstart your Wicket project, I know of no better place than this book.

I ordered and read the PDF version. The book is really well done. It allows you to jump into wicklet easily either your are a java web programmer or not. The book is following the pattern learn by exemple which is really good to start.

This is a great introduction to Wicket. You really need to already be familiar (at least a little) with Eclipse and Tomcat to get the most from this book. But it is a great first step into Wicket. I also bought Wicket in Action, written by Wickets creators. That book is also excellent, but is heavy with discussion of what's going on "under the hood", especially the discussion of models in chapter 4. Because of that, I recommend anyone new to Wicket to go through this book first, THEN go through Wicket In Action.

This book will talk you through getting things installed on your machine, getting things set up and making some starter projects. It does this in a very straightforward step by step process (do this.. do this.. etc). When you're done, you'll be familiar enough with Wicket (and using it in Eclipse/Tomcat) that once you start reading Wicket In Action you'll be able to concentrate on that books more detailed information about how Wicket operates and not have to be distracted with mechanics.

My only lament with both books is that they are a bit out of date. Wicket 1.3x is assumed in both volumes. The current release is (I think) 1.46. The Wicket API has changed a bit, and so has how Eclipse handles some Wicket constructs. Nothing terribly difficult. You may want to download the 1.36 version of Wicket (it's still available from the [...] site) and use that just for getting through the books. I would like to see them updated though.

Nonetheless, this is a great book for learning a new Java web framework. I have been personally impressed with it enough to dump working with Visual Studio and switch to this technology. Anyone who's a bit wary of the xml crazed nature of so many of the frameworks out there, and just wants to try programming again will enjoy it. It's a very hands on tool (unlike pretty much anything from Microsoft) but a much cleaner, more traditional programming approach than JavaServer Faces, which to me epitomizes the current trend to over reliance on xml for everything. Enjoy!

This book is a great Wicket starter book... It is aimed at the Eclipse IDE, but with a little web reading, you can work through the book using Netbeans.

I wanted a book that didn't assume understanding another framework, just a little html and Plain Old Java. This book was it. I got another Wicket book, but it assume a certain level beyond a wicket beginner.

This book goes through step by step and explains things very well. There is a different teaching style, but I think it is nice. You should download the first three chapters (PDF) from his website, just to make sure you like the style, but I think you will.

Great introduction to Wicket. You might be better off with the PDF version (which you can download from the author's website) since you can copy and paste the code as you try out the examples.

this book is so bad, I don't even know where to start. I've read many technical books, and used many more as a reference. This book is good for neither. Here are some of the major problems/examples of what's wrong with it (by no means a complete list):
-- there is very little text. There are many, many redundant screen shots of what one would see in the browser if one ran the code. Instead of explaining what goes on, the author uses ugly and hard to follow state transition diagrams. I've never seen anything like this, not even in a worst design spec written by an intern.
-- there are no explanations of how things work. None. Ok, I don't really care about the guts of Wicket in too much detail, but I need an idea of what is going on. Even the code examples that ship with Wicket do a better job.
-- I am not sure who the author thinks his audience is. Instead of describing the threading model of Wicket, he goes into a long and unpleasant example of a race condition involving a database. Is he aiming at someone who hasn't dealt with threads, and yet is developing a website? Well, I doubt his crash course on race conditions is going to be much help to them. And he does nothing to answer questions about threading and Wicket.
-- he doesn't address any basic concepts that one needs to deal with when implementing a website. Just some very basic examples that he goes through in a very unorganized and confusing way. And forget about using this book as a reference -- open it to any page, and all you see are screen shots and diagrams.

Ok, enough ranting. Off to the Wicket website to get some real information. This book is raising my blood pressure.