Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to Evaluate, July 16, 2002
I learn best by doing. When I buy technical books, I prefer those that include a lot of working examples. I have recently had an immense quantity of J2EE architecture poured into my somewhat leaky old brain, and I was looking for something that could get everything to gel together when I happened on this book. Since Weblogic Server 6.1 is the server in use on my current assignment, I bought this book with the intention of cobbling together a test environment and working through its many examples.At first the going was pretty good. Zuffoletto has an easily readable style and, with his guidance, I got the server up and running without too many traumas. I was OK until I started to work through the RMI examples in the book. They didn't work. After some fumbling, I went to the website and downloaded the updates examples. They were quite a bit different, but still didn't work. Fortunately, I have knowledgeable friends, and we eventually filled in the gaps and got everything up and running. My first issue with the book is that this pattern repeated itself frequently. The text itself is great, but from a practical viewpoint, the supporting examples have many gaps in them. Sometimes the errors are glaring - failure to qualify the class name when running it in the JVM. Sometimes they are quite subtle. I frequently got the feeling that the book was really written for Weblogic 6.0 and then given a slight makeover to adapt it to 6.1. In addition, the book often fails to provide the kind of detailed practical explanations of how to compile and where to place code that are vital to beginners. I also think Zuffoletto should have spent more time working through the intricacies of managing the Weblogic Server. As it is, the book is more focused on being a general introduction to using the technologies that WLS 6.1 supports. This isn't necessarily bad, but I found myself struggling to figure out whether I had set up the parameters correctly a few too many times. In addition, I had some problems because I use MS SQL Server for persistence rather than Oracle, and so was left out in the cold a bit. On the good side, this is a very well written book that covered an immense amount of material without getting bogged down anywhere. It starts from scratch and takes you from setting up the environment and the development team, to the various API's (JNDI, RMI, JDBC, JMS, JTA, and JavaMail), and then through the major development patters (JSP, EJB, etc.). The final third of the book focuses on Weblogic administration and support and then some time is spent on what I think of as more emergent technologies (such as SOAP). If coverage isn't always as deep as it could be, one has to keep in mind that this is a 900-page book as it is. I guess my real problem is that the book doesn't quite live up to its hype. Which is, perhaps more the fault of the publisher than Zuffoletto and his team. It is Hungry Minds, after all, that put the '100% Comprehensive, Authoritative, and What You Need' on the books cover. Well, it's a bit more like 70%, but that isn't all bad. Had the examples been a bit more workable (perhaps by expanding on the books website) I would have been very happy with it. As it is, I don't regret reading it at all,
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow, April 18, 2002
I'm currently preparing the SUN Java2 architect certification. In this context, I read almost everything that gets published around J2EE. There are a lot of good books around but this one is special. It covers a lot of ground (JDBC, JNDI, RMI, JTA, JMS, JavaMail, servlets, EJBs, security), and at least it does this in the context of one of the most popular J2EE application servers, whilst most of the other books remain quite theoretical.
As a developer, you don't want to invest a lot of money in an application server for trying out things at home, right? I tried to make code run either in SUN's reference implementation, or by mixing open source containers like JBoss ant Tomcat (or Resin). Those are also very good products, and at the end of the day, you'll get the code running, but it's by no means a trivial task. Here, just download a 30 day free trial version of WebLogic 6.1 from BEA's site, install it, and you get the examples running immediately.
Also, considering the popularity of the platform, it's a small investment that could pay back very quickly in your next job.In just one word: Wow!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Consider this book recommended!, July 5, 2002
If you are new to WebLogic, I suggest that you get this book. If you have been working with WebLogic since before the EJB .8 spec., I suggest that you get this book.I really enjoyed reading the Weblogic Bible. I've been using WebLogic off and on since before EJB existed, and I still learned a bunch of new tricks. This is an excellent reference that can be read from cover to cover. I liked the small examples and the emphasis on deploying the examples. I especially like all the examples of setting up the configuration with an explanations of what the different parameters are and when to use them. I like going from concept to implementation, and that is what this book does. Unlike some other WebLogic centric books, the coverage of EJB CMP/CMR was pretty good. A couple of things I did *not* like as follows: 1) A few times the examples were WebLogic centric when they could have been written them in a cross platform manner ( wrt J2EE ). (Note: A prerequisite of this book is a working knowledge of J2EE.) 2) The EJB examples hard coded the JNDI parameters instead of using the jndi.properites file in the classpath, which is the preferred approach for cross platform J2EE development. I realize that at times you have to write things WebLogic centric to utilize their extensions to J2EE, but I found the book also did this at times when it was not really necessary to do so. A J2EE veteran will catch the difference, and a J2EE novice will not. Bottom line... have a working knowledge of J2EE before reading this book and there will not be any problem. The coverage of performance monitoring was really well done. And, the ideas for optimization and thought process behind it was also really well done. Consider this book recommended!
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