8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well written, in-depth coverage, September 25, 2008
This review is from: Wicket in Action (Paperback)
I don't normally review books on Amazon but this is one of the best technical books that I've read in a while. The authors do a great job of organizing and presenting the material. The book is easy to read and I was able to get through it in about two evenings. I'm now using it as a reference while I work on my first major Wicket application. It might help that Wicket itself is well structured which makes the concepts that much easier to understand.
That being said, there are a few short-comings:
1) The cheese and lasagna examples get really old really quickly. The authors could have used different concepts or something a little more relevant or interesting to most developers.
2) The book is somewhat short. While they covered the core topics well, I felt that a few things we missing. I was surprised to see that the publisher trimmed the book and put an extra chapter online but not in print.
3) Some fundamentals like what DTD to include in an HTML page or what the Wicket web.xml should look like would be nice. You can find these answers online with a quick search but this book should really cover it.
But these faults don't hurt the overall usefulness of the book. It would be nice if most/all of this documentation was available in the Wicket project itself, but no such luck which makes this book even more valuable. I don't know if it will be in all copies, but my copy had a coupon for a free version of the digital book (PDF I suppose)... nice touch.
I recommend buying this book and learning about a very reasonable alternative to JSF.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book!, September 23, 2008
This review is from: Wicket in Action (Paperback)
This is a great book that really gives a in-depth overview of Wicket. I've been working with Wicket for a couple of years and had to suffer through figuring things out from examples and mailing lists. This book is the definitive guide. I've already learned several new things from it. Many thanks to the authors who went to great lengths to get this book out!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent introduction and reference to Wicket, February 4, 2009
This review is from: Wicket in Action (Paperback)
I began using Wicket a number of weeks ago, and could easily see from the lack of consistent online documentation, that I'd need a book for the more complicated aspects (such as Form components) and some mundane ones (like localisation). This one proved to be a good choice of book. I started with a rough idea of how things are constructed, but I've learned alot since that I've been able to apply to my own project.
The book is well structured, the examples are clear and the book covers everything from setting up an application, to creating reusable components, to integration with dependency-injection frameworks (albeit only Spring) and provides a good reference for doing everyday things with Wicket.
One thing I really like about this book is that its code samples are very concise and contain very little extra boilerplate. The extra little annotations on the side, pointing out the different parts of the code sample also make it easier to break each down and examine it at a glance.
Another incredibly useful aspect of the book is that many of the things that it points out are actually relevant to web application development, such as the use of Ajax, the creation of custom components, bookmarkable links, authentication (something IMHO missing from many web framework books) and the implications and pitfalls around many design decisions (e.g. the use of model inheritance, on pp93-94). I was very pleased with Ch8 about reusable components as it helped to answer some of the more advanced questions I had when designing my own panels. Its also good to see something on page composition and the different page composition strategies (Ch7).
One thing I found hard to work with was the explanation of the architecture of Wicket in Ch2. My experience with Wicket has not led me to interact with many of the classes mentioned, except during debugging when I've dug right down into the frameworks internals in order to determine what was happening with my own code. It seems like a chapter that you can come back to after you've been reading the book for a while, as its hard to relate to in the context of the rest of the book. This seems to be the case because Wicket's architecture only exposes you to the parts of Wicket that you need to interact with (components, models, pages, panels, behaviours and the Application object) and nothing else.
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