Customer Reviews

IBM WebSphere Starter Kit (Book/CD-ROM package)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is currently the only WebSphere 3.0 book on the market, but it's still not worth buying if you need to actually implement WebSphere or deploy enterprise Java code. The book is really a HIGH level overview of the product, and goes into greater depth on products that tie into WebSphere than on actually configuring and using WebSphere itself.

As an example, it's not until Chapter 40 that the authors discuss the WebSphere Administrative Console, which is where all post-installation WebSphere configuration is done. At least half of the chapter is bulleted list of menu items. (Didn't the authors think we could read these straight off of the console?) Administration tasks are, for the most part, ignored.

Chapter 21 - "WebSphere Security Services" - is a 4 page "quicky" on web security in general, and not WebSphere-specific, dispite the title. The lack of more detailed WebSphere security configuration info is an emormous omission: security in WebSphere is disabled by default, but there's not even mention of this fact!

The book is useful if you need just an overview of WebSphere, but if you need reference material or technical direction then the product help files and documentation and IBM web site are much better sources of information.

There's clearly a market for books to compete with and improve upon this effort.

The book is good but you should understand what it is for. It's exactly WebSphere Starter Kit as it called in the title. It gives your overview of numerous WebSphere components and you start to understand what they are and what to read next. But it's not a tutorial. It contains some code samples, but it's just illustration what can be done. It's like if you visit space museum you can learn what is space rocket, but you don't know how to build it. It's also not a complete reference of WebSphere components and possible architectures. It's exactly the Starter Kit. CD also helps you to get started quicker.

WebSphere is growing so fast in many directions that it doesn't look like stable environment yet. And this book just reflects this situation. Authors give you good explanation of core techniques and they also try to focus on the most important and promising new components, but sometimes it's not obvious.

And, finally, IBM likes very sophisticated and complicated solutions (just compare Token Ring and Ethernet, IBM old OSes and Unix, SNA and TCP/IP). WebSphere is a complete and scalable solution, it works and you can really use it for e-business, but it isn't easy reading. Be ready to study a lot!

The CDROM included with this book is worthless. The chapter "Installing and Starting Websphere" describes installing Version 2.0 of Websphere Application Server, but the CD contains Version 3. As a result, not a single paragraph or screen shot is even remotely accurate. Furthermore, The book says that DB will be installed automatically as part of the installation. DB2 is not on the CD at all. And either DB2 or Oracle MUST be installed in order for Websphere to even start up.

When I saw this book, I was very excited. My company recently deployed two websites on WebSphere, and I was looking forward to reading about additional ways to tackle e-commerce applications with WebSphere.

Imagine my disappointment when I opened the book and found that it only covers WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 2.x. There is a brief mention of WAS 3.0x, but that's about it. WAS 3.0x has been shipping since last fall. There are significant changes (like a complete rewrite of WAS) to WAS 3.0x. WAS 3.0x has a completely different administration console then WAS 2.x. WAS 3.0x supports different levels of the Servlet and JSP APIs than were supported under WAS 2.x.

The book looks interesing for its breadth of coverage, but I'm not sure how up to date it is regarding other product covered in it.

Also, there is virtually no coverage of deploying WAS in the UNIX space. There are a few tidbits related to Solaris, but that's it.

I'm really shocked that anyone would publish a book about such an old product (in web years).

If you are looking for a book that covers servlets, JSPs, or EJBs, look elsewhere. For servlets, take look at the James Goodwill Servlet book, or look at Wrox Press's Professional Java Server Programming. For JSPs take a look at the Manning Press JavaServer Pages book. For EJBs take a look at the O'Reilly EJB book (second edition).

The company I work for decided to use IBM products for setting up our web-sites.

Without having any serious training with Servlets/JSP I managed to install WebSphere from the attached CD, connect it to previously installed Oracle DB, and develop a running application based on the provided examples.

The book provides a lot of background and explanations about other IBM products, that might be either helpful or not. For most people that would seem redundant, but I think it is useful to have this material as reference.

This is an outdated book. Disappointing. I bought it at the time since it was like the only book about websphere. Today you have more choices.

The book is far behind the current Websphere version - you will find that installing, administering, and even running the websphere test environment on visualage for java are now different.

The book is not a "beginners only" book, it has a lot of chapters on enterprise features (CORBA, IBM San Francisco, EJB on Websphere, Connectors, Tivoli enablement modules, etc) but if you are after such advanced features, I'm sure you'll appreciate a more up to date reference.

If you will work with Websphere as a *developer*, probably a good starting point for beginners would be to get the IBM redbook: "Servlet and JSP programming with IBM Websphere Studio and Visualage for Java". (This book does not refer to the latest version either, but its contents are not so much version specific.) The printed version can be found at Amazon, and you can get a soft copy from the IBM redbook site. This book has only one chapter specific to websphere application server - about configuring, adminstering, maintaining- but that would be enough to get started. No EJB's, no connectors, only servlets, jsp's, sessions, and the standard edition of websphere.

Good stuff: Covers wide range of technologies and allow you to quick grab a lot of new stuff. If you novice in web development you can read about ejb,servlet and etc in one book and it saves your time.

Bad stuff: Examples have a lot of mistakes, and when you try to run your first ejb and you need to fix a lot of typos in code it wastes your time. Authors use WAS2 and your probably will use WAS3, so all explanation about deployment is useless.

If by the time you will read this review you can buy another book - buy another, but now it's only one about websphere so you just have no choice.

Last week I finally got a chance to start reading the book, on a very long flight to Asia. Great Stuff! The book is very readable, and is true to the title by focusing on being a starter-kit. This book is an excellent way to get going with Websphere. I was a bit put off by all the flak this book got on the various postings here, but hey - did these guys not notice the "Starter" word on the book cover?

Having a bit of experience with servlets and JSPs using Apahce/Tomcat I was eager to plunge into all of these as well as EJB. The book is certainly a good way to do all that, although a separate EJB book could come in handy. My only important reservation is that a new edition MUST be published to update this to WebSphere 3.5 or at least 3.0.

This book covers an obsolete version of Websphere Application Server (WAS). The sample code in the book is NOT included on the CD. Too many details about how to deploy servlets and JSPs with WAS are omitted from the discussion. The book is really aimed at helping programmers write code that could easily be used with almost any Application Server.

This book is helpful in two things - it is both broad in terms of providing a complete overview of the WebSphere family of products (including load balancing, Tivoli integration, and the tools) but also gives a lot of details on the important stuff like EJBs, servlets, JSPs, and XML. I recommend it both for people working with WebSphere as well as people who are evaluating WebSphere. I don't think it is very appropriate for WebSphere experts.