Customer Reviews

What is WebSphere? Java, J2EE, Portal and Beyond! (Demystifying IBM's Middle Tier Technology)

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

 

 

I purchase the book based on some review. But it turn out it was really out-dated and some of the term the author himself can't explain well. It does has pulp fiction style, not suitable and serious enough for the real world at all. $65 for a 279 paged (2/3 of junk non-sense), pocket size out-dated little book? not worth it.

For anyone who has been thrown into a world of WebSphere and IBM middle-tier development, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Pretty soon, you're thrown into a world of SOA, session management, classloading configurations, Servlet and JSP develpment, worlkload management, portal servers and scalable hardward choices. It's pretty overwhelming, and that's exactly why a book like this one just seemed to be calling out to me.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised with the book I received, as I was expecting a somewhat more technical and overly verbose textbook that what I got. Instead, the book is written extremely well, and with a very funny and casually spoken flow. All of the core concepts that revolve around a Websphere architecture and environment are covered in good, but not excruciating, detail, and the explainations are often funny, and always easy to understand.

Anyone looking at having to work with a Websphere infrastructure, be it as a manager, developer, administrator or salesperson should definitely get their hands on a copy of this book. While it doesn't cover every possible thing in the Websphere world, it does cover the all of the key pieces that you need to know in order to look and sound knowledgeable.

My only complaint was the price, which is a little steep, but I guess that's just par for the course for IBM related books. I bought from the publisher through amazon, and got the book at a good discount. The seller was also the author, and actually responded quickly to a couple of my emails. It's nice to get that type of personal service.

Highly recommended.

Odd that they would put such an exorbitant price point on such a small book, I was expecting one of those doorstopper sized books Microsoft products usually get but this isn't much bigger than a pocket reference. I'm sure all of its sales come from online shoppers unaware of the size; I can't imagine anyone picking it off a bookshelf and forking out this amount.

2 stars because, despite the poor size/price ratio, as a pocket reference I like the layout.

Good book, gives a very good understanding of Websphere for beginners.
The whole book can be read in two weekends. It is simple to follow.

For the amount of information and pages the book has, it is too pricy.

My motivation behind buying this book was its space efficiency. I consider that as the core strength of this book. In days when people race neck-to-neck in turning out voluminous books, it is great to see someone, who values the reader's time and takes pains to provide the essence of topics in brevity. In that respect, I rate this book next only to the C Programming Book from K&R. For someone from the Unix/C/3GL world who wants a jump start in the Java world and J2EE, there can be no better book than this one. I learnt so much in the past four days that I spent reading this book than in the past several months googling for information and reading IBM redbooks. Prior to buying this book, I read in another review a note that the book is over-priced for its size. To some extent I was disappointed when saw how small the book was (mainly because we are all used to books with at least 1000 pages). But, on careful introspection, I am convinced that this book is worth the money I paid. If we go by the size of a book to determine its worth, the Yellow Pages or a Phone Book should cost more than most other books in the world. This book, in my opinion, is justifiably expensive.

Now for the downside, this is a badly written book. There are several unnecessary sarcastic comments, which are not needed to hold reader's attention given the wealth of information in the book. There are repetitions that annoyed me. There are several spelling and some grammatical errors. Pagination could have been better. There are special icons used to highlight information, but there is no guide to the icons and special notations. Perhaps the publishing was done in a hurry. The problem is that one does not know if the haste was in just checking typographic and gramamtical errors alone or it extended into the review of the technical contents. Since I used it for gaining an overall understanding of the topics, I did not focus on verifying technical correctness of the contents. They look correct to me, and I hope that the author did not compromise in that area.

If the author brings out a revised edition with the presentation defects addressed appropriately, I will buy a second copy of this book.

Great book, by an author that knows what he's talking about.
Enjoyed the reading, as it's funny and entertaining.
Do not buy this book if you want an exhaustive look "under the hood".
Do buy this book if you like to get familiar with websphere, and like to understand what it's about.

I attended IBM's WebSphere Application Server 6.1 Administration class and came out semi-stunned, having begun to learn a whole new language with J2EE and WebSphere. This book should be required reading prior to the class!! It explained things in English (or as English as possible given the topic). What a great complement to the class!

I wonder if anyone proofread this book. Although the book contains a nice overview of what WebSphere is about, someone forgot to clean it up, but made sure that the hefty price tag was in place.

Anyway, I recommend this book to a WebSphere newbie, as long as one can stand the errors (all grammar-related) and won't faint from the book's price.