Customer Reviews

Professional WebObjects with Java

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

 

 

I've been using WebObjects for several years now (since pre-1.0 days) and this is a terrific addition to my reference material. The authors are well known WebObjects developers, and have an excellent grasp on the topic.

The chapters on the DirectToWeb technology are worth the price of the book alone. Direct2Web allows you to provide substantial functionality without writing large amounts of code. This book has the only DirectToWeb tutorials that I'm aware of other than an article by Max Muller (one of the authors of this book) which was published on Stepwise.com.

The DirectToJava coverage could have been more extensive (read that as more chapters... more coverage) but the one tutorial is certainly a good introduction of what is possible with that technology..

Another strong point about this book is that it covers the released version of WebObjects 5.0 for Java, not a beta version... and both Mac OS X and Windows development environments are given equal space.

While this book COULD be very good, as the information it tries to convey is useful, it was written as though the authors had other things to do and couldn't spend any time on "readability" issues. There are many grammatical errors and words simply left out or juxtaposed which makes reading what is already fairly complex information that much harder. Perhaps this book suffers from the too many cooks syndrome.

Here is an example of bad grammer:
"A solution to this problem is to increase the adaptor timeout value to a value higher than 30 seconds. This requires in order to come up with a permanent solution"

After a few re-reads I figured out that simply changing the adaptor timeout value does NOT require modificaions of the application logic, etc. If they only would have started the first sentence "A temporary solution to..." and started the second sentence, "A more permanent solution requires... " it would have made a world of difference, although the phrase "modificaitons of the application logic, web server or database tuning" is still confusing. Do you need to modify, or tune the web server?

Here's another example a couple pages later:
"Each entry will have useful statistics about each application instance such as port numbers, unique instance number."

The authors should realize how sentences like these can really drain your time and energy when you are trying to understand things, but apparently they don't because these types of sentences show up a LOT.

I also echo another reviewer's thought that the book seems to meander from subject to subject with no real flow which doesn't help readability either.

That being said, there is still some good info to be found in this book once you decipher it. And that fact that there isn't much competition is why I gave it 3 stars. It's just a shame that they didn't want to put in the effort to get the "little" things right.

I started coding WO almost 2 years ago now and I sure wish I had this book sitting on my shelf when I started! To be honest I have not read this book from cover to cover, but I did browse all the chapters and the earlier chapters would have turned on the light bulb a lot quicker for me when starting out.

Having said that, this book is not limited to beginners. I have recently started the process of learning DirectToWeb and this book has already paid for itself with just the couple of D2W chapters there are. These chapters are especially important because D2W documentation is sorely lacking in the WO world.

A must have for any WO developers shelf.

The sample code used in this book doesn't compile with xcode or older versions of webobjects/project builder. Searches on the web for errata with good versions of the code were not found. Without working sample code, its impossible to follow along and make modifications to test out changes and experiment. This is not a version issue as I made a lot of effort to get older versions of WebObjects pre-Xcode to compile with as well as trying with Xcode. Its sad the authors do not care enough about paying customers to have not tested all the code before releasing it.
Some of the material in the book is helpful - but for a beginner is often not detailed enough or is confusing. I've had better luck with the other webobjects books on Amazon.

The sample code used in this book doesn't compile with xcode or older versions of webobjects/project builder. Searches on the web for errata with good versions of the code were not found. Without working sample code, its impossible to follow along and make modifications to test out changes and experiment. This is not a version issue as I made a lot of effort to get older versions of WebObjects pre-Xcode to compile with as well as trying with Xcode. Its sad the authors do not care enough about paying customers to have not tested all the code before releasing it.
Some of the material in the book is helpful - but for a beginner is often not detailed enough or is confusing. I've had better luck with the other webobjects books on Amazon.

I bought this book to teach myself WO from the gound up. It has been extremely helpful and I highly recommend it if you're attempting to do the same. That being said, the book is quite difficult to learn from. This book teaches from fairly narrow examples and leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate the general concepts.

Hi,

I bought this book as well as all other books on the topic AND took the training at Apple. Conclusion:

If you want/need to learn WebObjects, take the course at Apple (become good in Java first !) because no book available on the market today will really allow you to get passed the many subtilities of this environment. The learning cure is very steep. Get ready to become a Java guru otherwise you'll be totally lost.

As for this book, the Authors intent are very good, but I could not complete any of the very good techniques described. It gives you an idea of the potential WebObjects has, but it's not a HOWTO kind of book. The examples used are full of errors an ommissions which makes it impossible to fully understand the otherwise valuable techniques the authors are trying to explain. As a proof, I could not compile any applications by doing the exercices, only when downloading it from Wrox's very poor website. When analysing the downloaded source with the book's explanations, I discovered all the hidden java code required to compile the application. That's very frustrating because what they were describing was exactly what I wanted to learn.

The chapters on Direct2Web were great but a whole book would be required on the subject. The D2W apps I've tried with it generated too many errors and no one to turn to for help. D2W potential sounds very good, but it's ONLY for experts in Java I guess.

Anyway, it's still worth buying it, hopefully an errata page will eventually be publish or a second edition to finish the otherwise excellent effort. This book is really for experts only with a very good experience in WebObjects, Java, HTML and sql.

I found Ruzek's book much easier to read.

Regards,

OK .. I haven't completed the book yet! But, I have skimmed it entirely. The is one of the best computer books that I have read! WebObjects is deep, there is a lot to it. To use WebObjects one cannot not simply skim documentation and then start to hack away on a project. I started with one of the other books which was good, but effort wasn't yeilding my desired results.

After going throuh the work of reading, doing the excercises and digesting, I need to produce! I kept thinking, just go back to using servlets this ain't worth it. The other book wasn't exposing WebObjects well enough to get me psyched.

The quality of this book and clarity that it is giving me, has kept me working through the chapters. It is well detailed and fun to read. The book's projects are very good, and worthwhile. I feel that when done, my work will have been justified. This is not just a 50 pound redo of readily available product documentation, like so many other books. Most nerds can't write, these guys do, and they did an excellent job.

Next, I'd like to see a refernece manual.

I'm halfway through this book and find it disorienting. The examples don't fully go through the steps needed for them to work. It's like the author randomly talks about things without explaining how he got there. Even though it seems to be the only book on WebObjects, I would suggest saving your 40 bucks and reading apple's online guides which have helped me WAY more.

The code examples in this book didn't work.
There was no consistent flow.
Too many authors and no editor or proofreader.
Years of Java experience didn't help in understanding this book, when examples don't work, it's impossible to guess is it the framework that is failing or poor writing?
For a beginner, I highly recommend Joshua Marker's book. WebObjects is little known and used, I almost gave up exploring it until I saw on a discussion board to pick up other Webobjects books.
This book is no longer in print, and it's no wonder why!!!!!