Customer Reviews

JBoss 4.0 - The Official Guide

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

 

 

If you like to read pages of XML and code examples than this book is for you. If you looking for load balancing & clustering strategies, then you'll be disappointed.

This book thoughly covers the JBoss software, but is lite on advice and guides. Nearly half the book is code examples, DTD diagrams, and XML.

I think this quote from the book is a good recommendation for the rest of it: "JBossMQ fully implements the JMS specification; therefore, the best JBossMQ user guide is the JMS specification."

Have you ever been to a technical presentation on a product where the speaker goes off on the inner-workings of their product without giving you any background or without explaining terms and concepts very well? Or, perhaps you've worked with or met a person who starts talking to you about something technical, assuming that you already know the context of everything they're talking about, but you're thinking "huh?". Well this is an entire book that is written in that style.

I bought this book because I have Norman Richards' "JBoss: A Developer Notebook" and I loved it. Though I realized the format of this book was different, I expected the quality to be as good. I was very wrong. This book is very esoteric and would have received a bit fat "F", had my technical writing professor from college graded it.

My first gripe is that if you flip through the book, it seems like most of the book consists of snapshots, code, DTDs, and schemas. They could have done a much better job selecting relevant information. Thus, the book is very bloated with content that is very impractical. I think a previous reviewer already hit on this point.

My second gripe is that the book seems to be written for somebody who is (or wants to be) a contributor to the JBoss project. Most people would buy a book on JBoss to learn how to deploy / configure applications or to read about practical design decisions. The book focuses heavily on the internal workings and design decisions of JBoss. Don't get me wrong, I think that JBoss has a great architecture, but I wouldn't expect the second chapter of the book to be about the JMX microkernel architecture.

My third gripe is that they don't give you background on many things. They just start talking about some JBoss component or class without explaining the fundamental concepts to you in layman's terms.

My fourth gripe is that the book lacks decent structure; it parades back and forth between topics. For example, in the second chapter, they start talking about MBeans, then they diverge and go into a very deep (and very hard to follow) discussion about the classloader architecture. Then, they come back to talking about XMBeans. Why didn't they just talking about all the different types of MBeans in order? If I wanted to reference this book, it would be a nightmare.

Some parts are slightly better than others, but the lesser of two evils is still evil. Overall I'm very disappointed and would not recommend spending your money on this book.

This is a good book. However, I believe that the prerequisites for this book include both an *expert* level understanding of J2EE (A strong awareness of Java EE 5 would be preferred) and a very high level of understanding of JBoss itself. Plus, you'd have to want to know a whole lot about how JBoss works and why. Most of the information in this book is not needed to successfully develop on, architect for, or administer JBoss. The two audiences who will benefit the most are those who wish to contribute to JBoss and those who seek JBoss professional certification.

I picked up this book to flush out a particular topic. I found most of the text in the book on that topic to be identical to the free texts available through the jBoss site. It's a good desk reference, but I do not think it offers more than what can be found in the free documentation and maybe a few minutes spent on a search engine.

Given the authors one would expect the book to be good. The text is okay but when you try to run the examples as you read you run into numerous problems. Some examples don't compile on Linux (but work well on Windows), others compile but don't run. Everytime I had a problem on Linux I'd shift to XP and life would be orders better.

Some chapters are very well written. I like the one on JMX the best. Some are not so well written (Messaging).

As another reviewer pointed out, this book has a hard time staying in control of the focus... there is a half effort attempt at showing how to use JBoss in a developer oriented light. Much of the book is focused on what the author is familiar with and is enjoyable to him -- writing, adding to, and building upon JBoss.

Unfortunately, somewhere between the current timeframe and back when the creating of JBoss to engender an environment that makes the development process faster and easier, it feels as if a lot of the folks 'in charge' (e.g. the authors] at JBoss don't hide the sarcasm when someone asks a question that person asking could have known the answer if they have read every post in every forum, and every page of the thousands of pages of documentation.
The Java Tutorial with some topics beginning by telling the reader to make sure they know how to use XYZ before starting the current chapter, and in XYZ there is a reference to something else, which completes the loop... that's always been frustrating.
But this is worse.

This book is just an extension of that. Whether it's written or not, there is without a doubt a thought in the writers' minds that this book is helpful for someone who would just learn JBoss first.

There is also the tendency to believe that if someone is looking for help in JBoss, that they also have the desire, time, and inclination to take part in the writing of documentation, helping with the design of the code, etc... and again, no doubt this book just hammers this idea home.

It may be a fun and great thing to participate in building upon JBoss, and for those who enjoy it and want to do so, by all means do so... but not everyone who buys a JBoss book or visits the website has any goal other than getting the environment running so it could be used for a customer.

Great seller, condition (new), deliver was fast, prices low/reasonable.

Very well written book. Gives outstanding step by step instructions and explanations.

I would recommend this book if you are using JBoss 4.X. Be sure to check the version of JBoss before buying a book.

The book is an old edition but I still find it useful. The book, though labelled as used was as good as new. I recommend the vendor.

This book is not about understanding how JBoss works. Or any other high level concept.
It is about every little xml file that's needed to configure JBoss. The few samples of code are geared toward that as well.
If you need to know that, then this book's for you.

I don' t recommend buying this book, since it is just a printout of the JBoss Guide freely available on JBoss site. Given the speed at which JBoss evolves you would soon find yourself with a stale documentation snapshot. Besides, the low quality of this documentation doesn' t really deserve a hard copy. I admire the JBoss team for their work and their intuition in supporting and adopting the most promising and advanced technologies, like Hibernate and AOP. Frankly, I don' t understand why they don't make the little effort of employing a few professional trainers to create top class documentation and tutorials. It would greatly push JBoss into the market as most potential JBoss adoptees are pushed back by the lack of way to become skilled and confident at using this server. It would not harm their certification revenues , given that to pass the exam you HAVE to take the class.
Anyways, this text as other as noted is an arid, barely coherent, messy agglomerate of dtds, schemas, example code and superficial explanations. Not deep enough for the wanna be JBoss developer and not clear and detailed enough for the JBoss programmer or administrator.
It is just the typical product you would expect when the project manager tells his average Joe programmer : "Hey I know this sucks but we need documentation for our framework in one week so try to put something together".
I really wish the JBoss team will understand soon that clear documentation and engaging tutorials are the heart of a successful project. Meanwhile, save your money for something else.