Customer Reviews

Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2EE Applications

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I really like this book. It is not for beginners, and is not an "Intro to J2EE". However, for advanced developers, and especially those leaning towards the administation aspects of WebLogic Server, this book is an excellent resource.
The examples in this book are straighforward, and the accompianing discussion is well written and easy to follow.
A lot of discussions in this book cover advanced topics leaning towards deployment and administration (such as tuning JVMs, or understanding Thread usage), but there are some excellent discussions regarding architecture as well. There is not a lot of material discussing developing J2EE code.
This book should be a part of any advanced J2EE developers library, especially those using WebLogic (since so many of the examples are targeted towards that platform).

I read the book cover to cover and I must say this is by far the best WebLogic book I have read. It is very up-to-date (covers WLS 8.1), and it pulls all the WLS programming best practices that are scattered around a dozen or more newsgroups and web sites into a single volume. Unlike similar books that cover WLS in the context of J2EE alphabet soup, this book focuses on the following topics: web application, EJB, JMS, Security, Admin, Performance Tuning, Development and Deployment env setup, and Web Services, which represent >90% of your J2EE development needs. You will find practical info in every single chapter, and I found the discussion around entity beans, JMS, and JVM tuning exceptional. The "bigrez" sample is a miniature real world application, and the discussion on its design helps to tie the whole book together. For WebLogic beginners, don't look anywhere else - this book will get you started fast. Even for people like me who has a few WLS projects under the belt, you will come away with new information, and it also reinforces some of your hard-learned lessons.

Just a small complaints to conclude this review: I would move Chapter 13 on dev env best practices to Chapter 1, and reduce the amount of discussion on JSP. I also want to see some detailed examples on complex CMP relationships, as well as a separate and in-depth chapter on clustering that covers distributed JMS, MDB, and entity beans of various concurrency/caching startegies.

This is by far the best book on J2EE and Weblogic I have read. I like how the author explains every single step of a project (the bigrez.com project), from design to deployment, and justifying not only every choice he has made, but also taking time to explain other alternatives, why they don't fit for this project, and where they could be more useful. The Struts framework is widely discussed, and EJBGen has found a little place in the discussion.
It's very nice also to avoid "J2EE for newbies" type of discussion, this book is really starting where many other books and references stop.

This is an excellent book for the advanced user. The author assumes a knowledge of J2EE/Weblogic and builds on that. The focus of the book is Best Practises in building weblogic applications and it does just that. The book also lists new features in Weblogic 8. I also liked the example application.

If you are a novice user, then this book is not recommended.

If you have worked in J2EE (and specifically weblogic), then this is a must-have on your book-shelf.

Just to be up front, I know and have worked with the author so take my comments as you will.
If you are using Weblogic to build enterprise-level software you need this book. The author tends to stay away from the newer and more gimmicky Weblogic features (workshop) and delivers the information you need to know - in an easy-to-read style. You'd be digging through BEA's on-line documentation for a long time trying to compile the information and experience that went into this book.

In wouldn't give it five stars if I didn't think that it would be useful to every Weblogic developer/admin.

BTW: One reviewer asked why xdoclet wasn't used in favor of ejbgen. While both are basically the same idea, ejbgen focuses only on Weblogic and provides much deeper support and is supported by Weblogic 8.1. Unless your code base needs to be deployed on multiple platforms, ejbgen is the way to go for Weblogic development

I think it has everything for someone who wants to work on Weblogic server. You should know basic of JSP/Servlet & EJB to get information out of this book. I am new to Weblogic (but know Tomcat well) & found it very useful. I like style of explanation & author knows about server very well.

This book is worth every penny of its cover price. I found it to be goldmine of information, and I've been working with WLS since 4.5.1. A combination of reading/skimming this book, combined with my day-to-day WLS 8.1 work allowed me to gain a WLS 8.1 certification with little trouble.

The only thing they could do to improve it is to collect the best practices sidebars and print them on the inside covers, as many of the nicer patterns books do.

I have had the opportunity to work with the main author Greg Nyberg, on a Weblogic/J2EE based order entry system. I can verify that he is highly regarded and brings a wealth of knowledge to a project. Through "Master BEA Weblogic Server" some of that knowledge and experience is shared with the rest of us. This book is an excellent source of information for anyone who interacts with Weblogic and wants to know the how and the why of this application server. This book should prove very valuable to a few different groups of professionals. Network and Weblogic Administrators, J2EE developers deploying to Weblogic, and anyone investigating J2EE application servers will all find this book useful. I read this book cover to cover. It's not as dry as some of the O'Reilly books and provides useful diagrams when words won't suffice. It doesn't feel rushed and is free of the obvious typos that plague so many technical books today.
Highly recommended. Buy it, read it and keep it close at hand.

Rating this book is tough, it would be easy to say it should get 5 (or more) stars. Caveat: I have not read this book cover to cover, I am using it as a reference as needed, but I am sure I will end up reading nearly all of it.

Some of you may be aware that Gregory Nyberg wrote the WLS guide that was distributed with Richard Monson-Haeful's EJB intro book. He also has moderated a newsgroup associated with that guide. For that I think he deserves several extra stars.

Mastering BEA WLS is designed to be a second book on EJB's - it does not go over the basics (it is nice to find an author that does not insist on starting from the beginning). This book does a very good job of describing how to use WLS, with an emphasis on command line tools, especially ant. I think it is unfortunate that he documents using EJBGen and not XDoclet. I also think it is unfortunate that he does not describe the new split directory structure format. But this is nit-picking. The writing is clear, the tone is direct, the layout is clean, the index is good. Alternatives are explained in a nuanced manner. This is a highly polished piece of writing.

4 stars, 5 stars, 10 stars- I don't know. If you use WLS you will want this book.

An absolute gem of an intermediate/advanced technical book. Practical information on Best Practices, both on using/deploying/optimizing WebLogic Servers and on J2EE application development in general. It covers what the reference material leaves off. There is little cut-and-paste of the specs/manuals to beef up the page count here.
Although there is very little coverage on Resource Adapters (JCA).