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It's virtually impossible to find this much valuable info in one place. And please, don't bash this book until you've read the whole thing (which you may need to do more than once!).
The code on the CD works. As far as showing incomplete printed examples, do you really want every line of code printed in the book? Given the level of developer this book targets, they strike a fine balance of what goes on the existing 900 pages and what can be browsed on the CD. The only topic I had trouble digesting was their discussion on Mapper Objects (Ch. 16), but it's easy enough to understand the code.
I have yet to find a large technical book without lots of errors. I would rate the editing job on this book as 1.5 stars because of the abundance of seemingly careless typos. However, they're minor annoyances that don't detract from this technically correct marvel of a book. As developers, we need useful information. This book more than delivers and is worth every penny.
The begin my critique, the book attempts too much while accomplishing very litte. This is a book about J2EE programming with WebSphere, it should have been kept that way. Instead the authors try to provide introduction (at times having errors) for the J2EE technologies and make a complete mess of it. It takes great effort on the part of the reader to gather the core information that relates to programming/configuring WSAD. The book could have been much better if it included more hands-on exercises and cut out the crappy introduction to "enterprise concepts".
Secondly, about the examples. The examples are not complete (they often refer to the CD-ROM and I was reading the book on SafariBooksOnline, so this may not be the case when you buy the printed book). Moreover the explanation is in very high-sounding terms at times which makes it difficult to focus on the point that is being made.
This is definitely not a book for novice; and for the experienced it is a waste of time to sift through loads of nonsense before making any sense of whats written.
I have given it 2 stars because some of the hands-on stuff sections actually worked when I tried them, and the GUI snapshots were helpful.
J2EE was created to provide a standard framework to create complex, distributed, enterprise applications. Therefore I must take exception with the reader below who complains that this book is "not for a beginner". To enjoy this book in its entirety it is necessary that you are at least aware of the problems of distributed computing (concurrency, data synchronization, connecting to disparate data sources, etc.) and want to learn how to optimally use the IBM WebSphere implementation of J2EE to deal with these problems.
This book is the definitive reference to J2EE application development with IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer. Kyle and the other authors do an admirable job of "condensing" a vast body of knowledge and associated best practices into "only" 900 pages. This is the only book I know that covers all of the key topics of J2EE to a satisfactory level of detail within one book.
The thing that makes this book great is its combination of comprehensiveness and guidance towards using the platform correctly. As the saying goes, "a fool with a tool is still a fool", and J2EE's complexity in the hands of an untrained development team can have disastrous consequences. Therefore it is vitally important that you first understand the forces you are fighting against (i.e. the challenges of distributed computing) and then understand which J2EE technologies address these problems. Once you understand which problems you are trying to solve and which technologies help you solve these problems, it is necessary to understand how to optimally use these technologies. This book does an excellent job of explaining the problems, the applicable technologies, and best practices for applying the technologies.
Another excellent thing about this book is that the authors are obviously passionate about the technologies involved but they are not victims of hype. For instance, the first section of the first chapter on web services (ch. 32) is titled "If Web Services Is the Solution, What's the Problem?" It provides an excellent dose of pragmatism by taking a step back and answering the question, "What problems do the Web Services technologies help me solve, and what problems will they not help me solve?" Many other books simply treat Web Services as a panacea for all technological problems.
If you're developing with WebSphere you need to read this book. If you're developing with a J2EE platform other than WebSphere (shame on you), you will likely still find this book useful for the J2EE best practices it conveys that are not specific to WebSphere.
PS - If you are new to distributed computing and want to use J2EE, the best place to start is by creating a simple J2EE web application. Chapters 6 and 7 of this book provide a good introduction to doing this.
This book explains the approach taken by IBM, which uses WebSphere. A very powerful container, whose scope is so extensive that it is reflected in the heft of the book.
Several chapters give good generic descriptions of J2EE, Model-View-Container, Enterprise Java Beans, JSPs and Servlets. These are generic in that little here is IBM specific. Concise. But if you are new to these subjects, you may want to search for books dedicated to those, rather than turn here as a first resort.
The core chapters show how to use WebSphere to implement and host the above items. This, after all, is the emphasis of the book. Especially comprehensive descriptions are presented of Container Managed Persistence and Bean Managed Persistence and Message Driven Beans. And, most importantly, because this is central to commercial applications, how WebSphere rigourously handles transactions. Two-phase commit, rollback etc. These MUST work, and Chapter 28 explains how.
Throughout all this, the authors provide many screen captures of the WebSphere UI, as useful guides. Even just at this level, you can see the tremendous effort that IBM has put into making it as useful as possible. I do not say "easy", please note. WebSphere is highly intricate, and the book will give you an understanding of why this has to be so.
The authors (all 9 of them) go through the whole J2EE architecture from JavaServer Pages to Enterprise JavaBeans to Web Services one element at a time, including "bonuses" here and there, such as testing certain types of J2EE components, the Apache Struts framework, building a presentation layer using XML and XSLT, and mapping objects to data sources.
Each chapter includes a brief introduction to the technology, starting from the basics, and proceeds through the development steps in WSAD using lots of nice screenshots (which are mandatory for such a topic) and plenty of example code. Although some of the plain text is simply describing the wizards and dialogs of WSAD, the why's are always explained.
My biggest glitch with this book was in fact how the code snippets are rendered. Besides the mandatory typos and occasional weird wordings, the code snippets were often badly formatted and double-spaced which made them unnecessarily difficult to read at times.
The book comes with a 3 CD set of software, including trial versions of WebSphere Studio Application Developer, DB2 Personal Edition, WebSphere Application Server, and all of the book's source code. I had some trouble installing the software but that was most probably because I tried to customize the installations quite a bit
Over 800 pages of "let's walk this through together" type of tutorial is an admirable goal and the authors have done a good job making it a pleasant experience. The book has a lot of content and a lot of it is some of the finest text I've read about J2EE best practices. As one could expect, the trade-off is that none of the topics/technologies are really covered in complete detail. All things considered, I'd say this is a great first or second book about J2EE if you're going to use WebSphere Studio. I really can't say whether it should be the first or second, but I know it makes a great companion for a more in-depth technical reference.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.
-- De Caussade
