Customer Reviews

JBoss Administration and Development (Kaleidoscope)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Mostly useless to a J2EE developer or someone that needs to Admin a JBoss installation. The title must have been the brain-child of some marketing clown at Sam's. In addition the content is presented in a random and incomplete manner.

This book covers version 2.4. The latest version of JBoss is 3.0 which only has about 20% in common with 2.4. Do NOT buy this book if you are running 3.0!

The subtitle of this book "Administration and Development" is comletely inaccurate. The foreward begins: "This book is for the JBoss content developer and administrator".

No it isn't. It should be called "JBoss Internals", which is what it actually covers. Whoever chose the title was an idiot. How anyone could imagine that a book on JBoss that doesn't cover EJB deployment is aimed at administrators is beyond me.

Less than useless (if I could give it zero stars I would), as the "authorized" book, it will actively discourage people from learning JBoss.

This is NOT about administration or development using JBoss, it is about the architecture and development of JBoss itself.

That said, if you want to know WHY JBoss works the way it works this would be a decent book. If you want to know HOW to use it this will be worse than useless.

Initially I thought I can kick-start my JBoss installation and immediately jump into the detail of how to develop J2EE application and deployed it using JBoss application server. But my hope was totally shattered. I have tried Sun Microsystem's J2EE before and the tutorial is good and straightforward.

I hope the good reputation name of JBoss application server does not shunned the new comers due to this good reference book.

Almost 90% of the book described in detail the JBoss internal working principle with specific Java technologies. The free document supplied from Jboss home page is much clearer and better than this book that's totally useless for beginner.

The chapter on security might as well be encrypted. The authors constantly use terms before they are defined. They rarely give a comprehensible overview of subjects, they just jump in and bury you with details. These are some very smart guys who don't know how to write a text book.

I was very disappointed that I paid dear money to buy a book that was really terrible to follow. Perhaps people who are already intimate with the internals of a java application server may find this book useful, but I definitely do not recommned it for beginners. There is precisely half a page (p.17) that tells you how to test if the installation was successful. There is nothing in the book that tells you how to execute a sample application once the server is up - which URL to connect to etc.. If you are a hacker, go ahead and buy it. You will love it. If not, you are wasting your time with this book. It is better to stick with the newsgroups and the jboss.org site.
Sorry Authors, as much as I respect your technical prowess, unless you polish up the user documentation, I am afraid people are going to be turned off and turned away from the product.

Pages 351 to 389 walk you through the process of building and deploying a simple application using JBoss. The remainder of this 500 page book discusses JBoss internals.

If you're wanting to get a quick start on building J2EE applications on JBoss, this is not the book for you.

This book is a mess. It is rife with typos and confusing grammatical errors. Diagrams are cut off and/or poorly laid out.

This would be forgivable if the overall content hit the spot. However, as another reviewer noted, the main focus is on the internals of JBoss, not on how to use it. Ultimately, that's the biggest disappointment.

To ensure that nobody is disappointed by this important piece of an amazing product, I should first state what this book is not.

This is not a friendly tutorial that shows you how to build your first J2EE application. This is not a step-by-step guide with lots of pictures showing you how to deploy an Enterprise Javabean onto the JBoss Application Server. This is not a book about JBoss 3.0, also known as Rabbit Hole. Despite some poorly named "beta" releases, the JBoss 3.0 feature set is still in flux.

JBoss Administration and Development provides a ground-up architectural view of the JBoss 2.4.x product line. JBoss is an open-source J2EE-like application server, and this book teaches you how to wield that open source code as power.

You won't learn much about how to use JBoss from this book (the JBoss website forums are good for that sort of info), but if you are a capable developer you will learn to navigate every line of source code of this complex product, and be able to make whatever changes are necessary to make JBoss your own. You will learn about why the developers made some of the design decisions they did, and you will learn how the team turned a mundane API for monitoring software into the backbone of an astonishingly configurable software infrastructure.

And in the end, this book will make you a far better J2EE developer, even if you decide to go on and use Weblogic, Websphere, Orion, or one of those other products that did not win JavaWorld's Editors Choice Application Server of the Year Award.

This is a useful book - unfortunately, it has the wrong title. This book is a "JBoss Internals" training course presented as a book. Full of interesting information, but very little on how you go about developing, deploying and administrating a J2EE application with JBoss. Still, a useful buy for any JBoss user - if nothing else, because there's no alternative!