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4.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful material..., December 8, 2003
Review
As IBM gets deeper into the world of J2EE and open source technologies, it's important to know the toolset that's used to code these applications. For IBM, that tool is WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD). It's an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Eclipse IDE framework, and is customized to allow for easy integration of your code into the Websphere environment. This book will help you understand the tool along with the basic technologies you can develop inside the IDE. The book starts out with an introduction to the toolset and a brief tutorial on how to code a basic Java application in WSAD. There is a CD in the book that contains WebSphere Studio Site Developer, which is a smaller subset of WSAD. The examples are clear and step you through the different menu options. Next, the authors show you the outstanding debugging tool, and how to use it efficiently to root out development errors in your code. From there, each major technology (HTML, servlets, JavaServer Pages, JDBC, MVC architecture, and deployment) is covered from the perspective of how WSAD allows you to develop that type of application. As this is the first WSAD book I've had a chance to review, I don't have much to compare it against. I learned more about the tool than I knew before, and that's good. But there seemed to be a problem with focus as to whether it wanted to be a certification guide, a WSAD tutorial, or a tutorial on J2EE technologies. In other study guides, there is a heavy emphasis on the test. Here, the test almost is relegated to an afterthought. If I didn't know it was a study guide, I wouldn't view it as such. Also, when covering the different J2EE technologies, I'm not sure whether the book is trying to teach me the technology or the way to code it using WSAD. As a result, I felt that neither approach got quite the coverage it should have. The information presented is good, to be sure. It's just not as focused as I expected. I also recommend that you carefully read the explanations on setting up the workspaces for the exercises in the book. The code is there, but a special compression tool is used to allow all the necessary information to be placed on the CD. You really do need to have the CD code in order to effectively work with the exercises, and if you just guess at how to access the code, you'll end up very confused... Conclusion
A good addition to your library if you're starting out with WSAD and J2EE, and you'd like to get the certification as part of your learning process. Just don't let this be the only book or source you use if certification is your primary goal.
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by Igor Livshin
by Brett D. McLaughlin
by Dale R. Nilsson
by Parkin
