Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It is not a Handbook. It is a Good Guide, February 4, 2005
The authors told us in the introduction part of this book that it is for "both Oracle developers who want to make the transition to the J2EE environment and also Java developers who want to leverage the productivity tools and frameworks available in JDeveloper". The authors have done an good job to satisfy this scope, though I feel time by time that this is book is actually written for Oracle developers who have already exposed to Java/J2EE technology and also J2EE developers who possess basic knowledge about Oracle database technology. Otherwise, I do not recommend you to start your journey from this book. It could be too difficult. Further more, if you want to learn how to use JDeveloper 10g as your Java development tool, this book is not designed for you.
This book gives a good overview of the introductory information about JDeveloper 10g and many related J2EE technologies developed by Oracle. Such overview coverage is further enhanced by about 25 well-designed step-by-step hands-on practices, which are very helpful.
It is true that you may find a lot of learning material from Oracle Technology Network. However, I feel this book offers the unique value by covering this quite extensive and diversified subject in an organized way. By reading this book, you will certainly improve your productivity since JDeveloper 10g is a great tool and since otherwise you may feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information you may find online.
This book is based on Oracle JDeveloper 10g production release of version 9.0.5.1. The current Oracle JDeveloper 10g production release is of version 10.1.2. I found some of the step-by-step instructions may need slight modification due to the difference of the two versions, though I do not think it posses much difficult to any experienced readers.
Chapter 5, Java Language Concepts for JDeveloper Work, gives a very brief overview of Java concepts. Well, if you need to read this chapter, you are not ready to read this book yet. The good news is that this chapter is only about 30 pages long, less than 5% of this thick book. The development of the rest of the story is in a quite logic and readable order.
The authors explain to us that "this book is a `handbook' not in the sense of a complete guide to all areas of the tool, but, .., a guide for creating J2EE applications using JDeveloper". It is interesting why they still insist to call it a handbook. This book covers only many of the basic features of JDeveloper. If you are advanced, and if you need quickly find a good coverage on an important but advanced features, most likely this is not the book that will give you an answer. Many of the books by Oracle Press are already written in somewhat quite a technical manner. Calling it a handbook may actually scare away those who are new to 10g. You do not start studying a subject by reading a handbook, do you?
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good book for beginners, but limited for IT professionals, January 29, 2005
If you're coming from an Oracle Forms background, or have a technical background, but find the JDeveloper IDE a little too daunting with its mired of windows, this *is* a *good* book to start out with. I read this book front to back, and it does build your confidence in making your way around the IDE and using it's productive features.
The Oracle OTN website also provides a number of tutorials and papers that will do the same thing. The nice thing about this book is that similar tutorials and examples are collated together and presented in a logical progressive structure, so it's good value as apposed to learning everything yourself.
Where the book falls down, once you understand the tool, is how the technology fits together. The book *does* give detail on programmatically attacking the ADF Business Component layer. However discussions and experience on coding from the Struts/client/controller layers with the associated iterators is thin on the ground. Only one chapter mentions UIX, in not enough detail to make you productive, and little mention of ADF Faces which will receive a greater focus of the JDeveloper product in the future.
So in summary, a worthwhile book to pick up if you're just starting - 4 stars. Make sure you do read it from start to end. However don't expect to be writing enterprise level systems at the end of this book.... a lot of hard yards still need to be learnt, or alternatively, an "Advanced" JDeveloper book needs to be written - so this book is 2 stars for advanced users - it's not a handbook as such.... and gets 3 stars all up from me.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Book reading flow is choppy; clearly written by multiple writers, unfortunately., June 20, 2007
Whereas this book may have information throughout, that is not what makes good instruction. Some may argue that if you know "XYZ", "ABC", and "concept A" and "concept B", that this book is good.
But one should not have to fight to learn when the concepts are not difficult.
Briefly -- using the examples as given will still bring up errors when trying to run the examples on some people's systems [I found others with the issues I had in the Oracle forums, and was able to fix them; "luckily" for me, the examples that didn't work for me were the same as a number of others, so I didn't have to look far].
As an example of the flow in the book, in the beginning of chapter 8 [which is the beginning of Part II], it essentially summarizes where you are at; it mentions that you've gone through Chapters 1-4, and then it immediately states what is now coming in Part II [not mentioning chapters 5-7, as if the author didn't even know they were there], and then what happens in Part III. It's as if when one of the three writers wrote the beginning of Part II, they weren't aware that there would be three other chapters in Part I. [and this makes sense, because chapter 5 is very much out of place in where it is. Most people already know the Java part of it anyway].
Also, BC4J is talked about much in the first few hundred pages of the book, but really the best explanation for it is on page 224, after you've seen BC4J referenced numerous times already. And I understand this sounds picky while reading one part described, when the biggest issue is that the flow is all over the place.
One shouldn't have to figure out what the authors *meant* to be saying; the authors should say it. [and to reference this example further, the index lets you know you can find BC4J on pages 5, 6, and 109, but no mention of 224. If it did, you might see that the definition given on page 5 is different than the definition given on page 224, because the wording is different [one says BC4J is what came before ADF BC, another says it is just a different name for it].
Some people do not mind having to figure out what the writers were trying to describe, and for you folks, this may be good.
But, if you don't like having to first interpret the book, then learn what you are trying to learn, this is just something to think about.
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