Customer Reviews

An Introduction to IBM Rational Application Developer: A Guided Tour (Ibm Illustrated Guide Series)

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

 

 

"An Introduction to IBM Rational Application Developer - A Guided Tour" is a good beginners book. The book does not assume you know J2EE. For example, it walks you through what a Servlet is. Each chapter begins with an overview of the technology, which is even more useful for advanced topics like JMS.

The authors walk you through tutorials for the common RAD tasks. If you are already using WSAD, some of the tutorials are overkill. However, the advanced ones are still useful. The authors also provide tips of things that would be good to experiment with. I also found the example projects on CD to be extremely useful.

This IBM Press book doesn't contain much IBM slant. The book uses many common databases including db2, Oracle and SQL Server in each example. Tons of screenshots and code snippets are provided. The authors provide tips on the tool throughout that make you a more efficient developer.

Each chapter stands alone, making the book a good one to read before you try out a new part of RAD. I recommend this book to people new to the WSAD/RAD family of tools or those who want a detailed walkthrough of how to create a basic application in new technologies.

The RAD is a powerful way to develop Java applications for use in WebSphere. The authors presuppose prior knowledge of Java on your part. So that when they give examples of Java code, they do not have to go into a detailed explanation of the elementary syntax within these.

In the J2EE world, matters have grown to the extent that there is now a huge amount of classes and applications that one can learn. A formidable commitment. What the text shows is how to do many of these tasks under RAD for WebSphere. From a simple developing of a standalone Java application to doing servlet and Java Server Pages web development. RAD has an easy user interface, with convenient helper capabilities that reduces some of the tedious burden. Like being able to quickly compile and run a program that consists of several classes.

If you have already used Eclipse, the good news is that RAD derives from Eclipse 3. And RAD supports what is still the latest version of J2EE - 1.4. (Version 1.5 has not yet been officially released.)

The book also explains more advanced Java topics. As in Web Services, a potentially promising new field. It turns out to be pretty easy to build and publish a Web Service with RAD. Takes a lot of the mystique out of what it means to write your own Web Service. This alone can be a big plus for the book, to some of you.

Database interactions are also a practical part of many websites. I fully expected that the text would only deal with hooking to DB2. This is an IBM Press book, after all, and the authors hail from IBM. But surprisingly and commendably, the book shows how to connect to 5 databases - DB2, Cloudscape (which is from IBM), Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and Oracle. A pragmatic recognition that not everyone uses DB2. The various database examples may also help you develop database analysis code that is as independent of the specific database as possible.

Finally! A book that provides a starting point for learning about RAD.
RAD just provides so much for a user that its daunting to even know where to begin. All the tooling is great for advanced users but for beginners, we need help.

The book provides some useful starting material to become more familiar with the most important aspects of RAD. Its approach for delivering samples is different but it works.

I would recommend this book for beginners but for those who want to learn more advanced concepts, you will need to look elsewhere.

You have to start somewhere so this book will be a great benefit.

As I work thru this book I'm finding it's an excellent introduction to the major components of J2EE, not just RAD6. The short no nonsense explanations in each chapter are really excellent. You'll need other material to go further with a particular technology like Struts, etc, but this book is only trying to give you a flavour, and at that it's great.

If there's one BIG problem with the book it's that the tutorials are not always accurate or complete - but I've actually found that's helped me learn. I can't follow along blindly, but have to think about what I'm doing. I'm only up to Ch5,so I can't comment on the whole book, maybe it gets better.

One bad example occurs in Ch4, Tutorial 5. The "InvokeSP" Java code for Oracle seems to be just plain wrong. I can't even get it to compile (I'm using 9i, maybe something's changed using 10g, seems unlikely though). The java code given has a line:
stmt.setString(4, OracleTypes.CURSOR)
To get the resultset you need to replace the bit of code around that line with something like:
stmt.registerOutParameter(4, OracleTypes.CURSOR);
stmt.execute();
ResultSet rs = (ResultSet)stmt.getObject(4);

At least in this book IBM have acknowledged that not everyone uses DB2, and have examples using other major databases, which is really useful.

I admit that this book is right on target for how it is structured for people to learn the fundamentals from the ground up. It follows a natural learning format from beginning to end. However, the book is riddled with programming inconsistences and errors. For example, you are left to figure out parameters that are named one way, but are written differently on another page for the same program (see page 48 => arg2.doFilter should be chain.doFilter). Also, there are instances where the book tells you that you will find certain things within a perspective, but when using the IDE, you find the book is not accurate (see page 57=>cannot see Servlets tab when double-clicking on the Web Perspective Deployment Descriptor, but it is in the Java Perspective when you double-click the Web.xml file). The book was written in a hurry, it appears, and is really for a developer who can see the mistakes and correct them on the fly when going through the tutorials.

An Introduction to IBM Rational Application Developer is a good introductory book. It covers a wide range of topics such as JavaMail, Struts, Tiles, JSF, SDO, Datasource, JAXP, XSLT, CMR, JMS, MDB, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and etc. It even covers how I can detect memory leaks on my application. This book is very useful for me.

Ch 3 - Introduction to Web Development
Ch 4 - Introduction to Database Development
Ch 5 - Introduction to XML Development
Ch 6 - Developing Enterprise JavaBeans
Ch 7 - Java Messaging Service and Message-Driven Beans
Ch 8 - Web Services
Ch 9 - Advanced J2EE Topics
Ch 10 - Creating Java Visual Applications
Ch 11 - Team Development with CVS (Windows and Linux)
Ch 12 - Introduction to Profiling and Logging
Ch 13 - Visual Modeling

This book is great. It covers everything I need to know in RAD. All the tutorials are pretty much independent of each other. Unlike most of other technical books I have read before, I could pick and choose any topics to learn when I need to learn them. Furthermore, the step-by-step tutorials are precise and easy to follow. I can run the samples from the book right away on the test server without any extra setup. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is new to RAD.

Overall I am impressed with the well structured chapters. Very well organised.
Examples used in this book are very practical and easy to follow.

If there is a new edition in the future, would be great if it can incorporate chapters on plugins like Hibernate, Business Process Manager (Workflow) and Business Rules inside RAD.

I am using this book for a class which is requiring us to go through all of the tutorials.

Pros-
You will gain decent experience with writing java servlets, database apps and XML.

Cons-
We are using the most recent version of RAD so some of the pictures in the book are not exactly the same, but they are close enough for you to figure it out the steps you need to take. The tutorials do well at teaching their topics (writing an xml file, java servlets, filters, etc.) but they do not explain a lot about RAD itself. Many times I could not get a tutorial to work because of something as trivial as a setting with the server that they forgot to mention in the tutorial. Be prepared to be frustrated with some of them.

This is a great book for learning the Rational IDE, it's not a book for learning J2EE/XML/EJB/UML but preceding each tutorial is an overview of the technology. I only have the Rational Web Developer product but could still perform most of the exercises in this book. I especially liked that the chapters and even some of the tutorials in the same chapter are independent of each other. You can go directly to chapter 5 and learn about using the IDE and XML without having to perform the exercises in previous chapters. Most importantly, the exercises actually work! Sometimes you have to do a little searching to figure out how to get to the next screen shown but for the most part enough detail is given. If you have the Rational Web Developer or the Rational Application Developer IDE and have always wanted to learn how to use it to make your development life easier, you should get this book.