Customer Reviews

Professional IBM WebSphere 5.0 Application Server (Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

This book has been a huge disappointment. Wrox books had the
habit of being no BS, clear, hands-on, detailed techical tutorials.. and this is why they had their original success. But now, perhaps in conjunction with being bought by Wiley, Wrox is definitely going down. The authors of this book souns like IBM managers, not certainly programmers. The first chapters do not contain ANY techical info but just advertising for IBM products (I am not making this up..!)
The rest of the presentation is a confused, disorderly, bloated,
verbose, unnecessarily complicated sequence of "click here and then click there" instructions. If you have some brains this book will be unbearable, if you have none, well you're probably one of the authors.
What is most irritating and annoying about this book is the pompous, monotonous, slow tone aimed at passing straightforward
technical notions for rocket science, which unfortunately seems to be a general trend at IBM.

I found this book extremely disappointing! It was full of errors and left important steps out of the practical exercises. It took me a long time to read, as I spent hours trying to locate some of the screens they were talking about so I could follow along with the discussion!

There are a lot of things wrong with this book. I gained very little on WAS (ass opposed to WSAD, which I don't use) from it that wasn't available in the application docs (which are pretty poor to start with). But let me sum it up with an example.

The cover says "A Guide to Building J2EE Applications". In the index under debugging, I find:

debugger, 78
debugging business processes, 461-462

I don't know about anyone else, but such minimal coverage of such an important topic makes me think that the authors must not have ever actually developed an application using WAS.

This book is very informative, but there are so many typos and, sometimes, wrong information. The code in enclosed CD is very sloppy.

This book covers an amazing amount of new material specific to deploying WAS 5 in an enterprise environment. The authors are all IBM All-stars who work with the WAS 5 product family on a daily basis and it shows. I have never found some of the information here, such as the details of Business Rules beans, Business Process management or Work Area Service anywhere else.

My pet peve is the WROX production style - they cram so much into a book, I prefer Addison-Wesley's layout style better. That's the reason for only 4 stars. The book should have been two volumes. Chapter 12 on Deployment Topology and Workload management have several diagrams that are worth a lot. Appendix A gives great information on scripting the management tasks involved in running WAS 5. The commands are based on Jacl (Tcl like), and are used by many enterprise deployments. An absolutely overwhelming amount of material, including a 2 CD set with Websphere Studio App Developer Verison 5.

This may be a little premature as I'm only 100 pages in but, it's extremely refreshing to see a very thorough treatment of a J2EE focused product - that is rare to me. J2EE is not rocket science but, it is also not trivial as evidenced by the lack of good readable documention on the subject - despite J2EE ubiquity.

The authors are obviously extremely knowledgable about their product (WS and WSAD) and they patiently communicate it in an articulate manner that make learning this stuff as easy as it could be.

If you want something more concise and thoroughly difficult to learn from, go read the Sun J2EE specs, their fun... and their free and they mostly apply to WS.

I've never liked a book written by 6 people. Usually the compliation reminds me more of a pile of ... e.g. just a hack. This book appears to be the exception. You really gain an appreciation and an understanding of the elegance of the functionality of the WS and WSAD products.

I was a JDeveloper/9iAS bigot until this book and some experience with the WSAD/WS products.

The only 2 problems I see with WAS 5.1 (that's the version I'm currently working with) is that it's a step behind the competition (i.e. J2EE 1.3 versus 1.4) and that some of the WSAD wizards are mediocre but, that's not the books problem.

Thanks for the good job. Keep up the good work.

This book provides the most comprehensive coverage of WebSphere 5.0 application server that you will find anywhere. Includes coverage of WebSphere Enterprise extensions.

I paid OVER $80 for this book (dumb me, I know...) hoping I could get a version of WebSphere that might work with some sample applications but I was apparently asking too much. I go through the entire 30 minute installation process from both CDs
and then when I start WSAD 5.0 I get the helpful error message
telling me that 'The license cannot be found. IBM Websphere Studio application developer version 5.0.0 cannot start'. Well,
THANKS A LOT IBM - taking a lesson from the Microsoft playbook?

And OF COURSE there is no reference to this problem in the book or on the WROX website though there at least 20 license.* files installed with WSAD, none of which have anything to do with an actual license that can be read by WSAD when it starts. I'm taking the book back and hope I can get refund so I don't have to spend a day trying to figure this mess out. Thank God for WebLogic....

It is very hard to follow the example that is covered in various chapters.
The optimization and tuning the server is hardly there.

I found this book great. The examples were concise. The font was wonderful. Who knew J2EE could be so much fun?!?! (And those handsome dudes on the front sure don't hurt either.) 3 thumbs up