It's clear a lot of work went into this book. But even so, the result isn't very useful. A quick run-down of the pros and cons...
Pros
1. Broad coverage of Seam features. It's clear that Allen knows his stuff.
2. Lots of background information, explaining motivations and reasoning for Seam design
Cons
1. This book was written entirely for people who already know JSF and Facelets. If you want to know how to program a view template in JSF/Facelets/Seam, this book won't help. There's one chapter on Ajax, but it's light on the view layer and instead focuses on integration with Seam's component model. There's also a chapter on file uploading, PDF's, charting, and email support, but once again there's nothing on the basics of using JSF and Seam together in the view layer.
The author does a good job of discussing JSF's lifecycle shortcomings, and also explains how Seam fills those gaps. That's pretty good information, but it's really just theory, and shouldn't require a whole chapter.
2. The chapters on persistence are disorganized and very confusing. There's no single clear explanation of what's needed to configure persistence in Seam. I was hoping for a short narrative on what it would take to bootstrap a real-world application, including JPA's persistence.xml, Seam's components.xml, Hibernate's hibernate-cfg.xml, and all the settings needed to integrate with JBoss, all in one place. But that's not in the book. Instead the author spreads the explanation over three chapters, filling in with lots and lots of background theory. You're left having to read and absorb the whole book before you can write the most basic real-world application. And even then, things are so spread out that it's very, very difficult putting it all together and making it work. And unfortunately, the theory stuff just isn't that helpful, at least not to someone new to Seam who needs to get up and running quickly.
If you already have a solid understanding of JPA, JTA, and JBoss, you'll probably learn something useful, but if you're new to JPA and JBoss (like myself), you'll probably be more frustrated than anything.
3. The persistence chapters are also a bit schizophrenic when it comes to JPA vs. Hibernate. There's a section explaining framework's advantages, but it's rather small (which is interesting, considering how much the author likes theoretical discussion). More confusingly, the author tries to explain both Seam's integration with JPA and Hibernate all at the same time. You get a brief section on JPA, followed by a brief section on Hibernate, followed by another brief section on JPA, etc. It winds up being very scattered. It would have been better for the author to start with the basics of Seam persistence, and then explain Seam/JPA integration in full, followed by Seam/Hibernate integration in full.
Also, there's only the briefest mention of other JPA providers (e.g. TopLink, OpenJPA), and no discussion of how to integrate them.
4. There are two chapters missing from the book that must be downloaded as PDF: Chapter 14 covers JBPM, and chapter 15 covers Spring integration. They're not listed in the TOC, nor are they mentioned in the introduction. But the author refers to them throughout the book. And as it turns out, JBPM plays a rather significant role in Seam.
The JBPM chapter is in fact one of the reasons I bought the book, since there's very little good documentation online. I think it's rather flaky that the publisher left this chapter out of the book without mentioning it on the cover.
Overall, I give the book two stars because it contains a lot of good information. But no more, because there's important information missing, and because much of the information is lost in disorganization or non-practical theorizing.
There's a line in Appendix A that crystallizes my reaction to the book. The author writes on page 557, "Second to this book (sorry, I'm biased), the best resource you have for using Seam is the Seam reference documentation, which weighs in at 500-plus pages." As it turns out, I find that I completely prefer the online Seam documentation to this book, even though the online docs are lacking in many regards. I also find it rather ironic that, when the author wrote the above line, he was unaware that his own book would also weigh in "at 500-plus pages."
I'm very much wishing I hadn't invested $45 and several hours in this book. It's now parked on my shelf, and I doubt I'll be using it much in the future.
