Customer Reviews

Mastering IBM WebSphere Portal: Expert Guidance to Build and Deploy Portal Applications

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

 

 

The contents of this book would better be found in technical documents such as user guides, architecture guides, and admin guides. That some reviewers report that this may be the only place to find some of this information says more about the paucity of good IBM documentation (or perhaps just the poor organisation of the IBM portal support site) than about the quality of the book.

This book is fairly limited to the "To save your data, click 'save'" brand of instructions (I thought Microsoft owned the patent on this technique?). Since many many portal configuration pages are self-explanatory, much of this instruction is wasted. And aside from a brief foray into Portlet development, which is a not-too-bad treatment for a neophyte, there is nothing for a developer.

Finally, the name is misleading. Certainly, there is nothing in this book that could possibly lead to "mastery" of the IBM WebSphere Portal.

Don't waste your money.

Best book for learning WebSphere portal (and I have them all). The redbook is also useful but this book is the first one you should read.

This book doesn't even come close to its title. While there is some useful information, it appears to be obvious that this book was slapped together in a rush. Chapter 18 ends abruptly. Chapters 19, 20 don't even exist - in fact based on the table of contents pages 354-403 are missing.

And don't bother trying to find these pages on the "companion" book site. They don't exist there. You have to beg the publisher to get a copy.

Honestly, not worth the time - try downloading a free IBM Redbook instead.

Anyone who is involved with WebSphere Portal should have this book on their shelf. This book covers a broad spectrum of portal topics that make it valuable when researching a problem or designing a portal solution. If you are just starting out with portal you may want to skim one or two of the chapters (such as chapter 5) which is relevant in theory but may not be accurate for the latest released versions of the software. Many of the other chapters are right on, covering topics such as JSR 168 and WSRP which are continuing to grow both in capability and interest. Enjoy!

This book is packed full of clear and concise definitions of how WebSphere Portal works, along with step-by-step tutorials that fianlly put everything in one place. If you need to install, configure, design, develop, debug, troubleshoot and rollout a Portal 5.0.2 environment, this is an essential tool.

My personal book is annotated, dog-eared and full of sticky notes, and has proven an invluable asset.

WebSphere Portal (WP) is becoming a major technology, but there's still not a lot of books out there to help you understand and implement it. I had a chance to review Wiley's Mastering IBM WebSphere Portal by Ron Ben-Natan, Richard Gornitsky, Tim Hanis, and Ori Sasson. Having done some work with Portal, I can say I wish I had this book a lot sooner. It would have saved me some headaches.



The chapter breakdown: Introducing WP; Installing WP on Windows 2000 Server; Installing WP on Linux; Customizing WP; Installing WP Tools and Problem Analysis; Migrating to WP Version 5.0; Defining Portals and Pages; Tailoring the Portal Web Design; WP Personalization; Portal Administration; Document and Content Management within WP; Adding Collaboration and Search Components to Your Portals; Extending Portal Functionality: Portlets; Portlet Programming Model and API; WebSphere Portlet Development Environment; Portlet Development; Portlet Interactive Debug and JSR 168 Example; Struts Portlet Framework; Implementing Authentication for Large Enterprises; Integrating Security and Identity Management Tools with WP; Designing High Availability into Your Portal Server; WP Support for Web Services and Remote Portlets; Integrating External Applications with WP; Supporting Mobile Users; Index



As you can see from the list of chapters, there's a lot of information that spans many different roles. There's the administration processes, the development processes, security processes, and architecture. Regardless of what part of WP you are dealing with, you'll find something of interest in here. The authors are well-versed and experienced in WP developement and implementation, so it's not a rehash of "here's what the instructions tell you to do". Plenty of illustrations and code samples will help you quickly get to where you need to be.



From a development perspective (since that's my area of expertise), I appreciated the different looks at portlet development. I know that Struts is becoming a de facto standard, but it's hard to find information on how to integrate that into a portlet program. They cover that here. They also cover the differences between the WP API and the JSR 168 standards for development, which is very nice.



Basically, it's one of the most up-to-date books on WP that is currently on the market, and between it and the IBM redbooks you should be able to come up with a successful portal implementation.

Avoid this book at all costs! The title suggests that this book will help you "master" WebSphere Portal by giving you "expert" guidance. Nothing could be further from the truth! If the authors of this book were masters or experts of the subject, they certainly did not excel at presenting their expertise in book form. The writing is disjointed at best, as if the authors were passing pen and paper around a campfire, creating an improvised story. The text is full of typographical errors. The images (mostly screenshots) are even blurry, almost illegible at times. This book was definitely thrown together in a hurry with no regard for quality or accuracy. The content barely brushes the surface of various topics dealing with WebSphere Portal. There is no "mastery" demonstrated. I am very fortunate that the company expensed this book for my team. I would have hated to sink a single cent into this kindling. Stick to free online documentation where you can find it.

Is one of worst books I've ever read. Save your money and get the WebSphere redbooks from the IBM website. This book is not even finished, a lot of stuff is left half explained or not explained at all. Either the authors don't know what they talk about or they were just in a rush to put this book on the market.

This book is intended for four audiences: portal developers who will be working with WebSphere Portal Server, portal administrators, portal implementation specialists, and enterprise architects. Since I am a business analyst doing QA on a WebSphere Portal implementation project, I have skipped most of the instructions on how to install, how to access functions, etc. I'll leave that for others to review.

I find the book valuable as a way to understand portals in general and WebSphere Portal in particular. For me, the chapters on LDAP and mobile rendering were the most useful.

But the book is irritating, too. For example, there are lots of definitions of key concepts: very valuable. But they're scattered throughout the text: no glossary. Sometimes one of the authors will refer to the "user," and it's unclear whether he's referring to the end user of the portal or to the content creator: both are WebSphere users. Also, there's a good bit of Web Services in WebSphere, but no real "under the hood" discussion that might help the reader place WPS in clear relation to service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Much of my irritation stems from the editing. (I've worked many years as a technical editor.) At least two of the authors are speakers of English as a foreign language. Nothing wrong with that--if they get good copy editing. But Wiley has outsourced the copy editing. Different editors work on different chapters, they're probably in different countries, and their employer hasn't set down (or just not enforced) editorial guidelines and standards. As a result, we readers aren't getting the quality we deserve.

A extremely useful resource for getting started with Websphere Portal!