Rating:  - Good Content, Poor Editing
I am new to J2EE. I went to some Sun training and got a nice overview of what J2EE is. Now comes the question, how to use J2EE? There are so many decisions to be made. How do I make them? This book seems to do a very nice job of helping with that question.
However, I am disappointed in the editing of this book. I have read too many sentences that had glaring mistakes, enough that this is a distraction while reading, but don't let that stop you from buying this book.
Rating:  - Buy It. Read It. Repeat.
The sad thing is that there isn't really another book that compares with Expert One-On-One J2EE Design and Development other than the newer second edition. Flat out, this is the best book (and really the only one) that describes the trade-offs involved in implementing enterprise class j2ee solutions.
The strength of Rod's approach is its practicality. Rod doesn't feel pressured to use all of J2EE all of the time. He rightly discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the specs and reasonable tradeoffs in architecture, design, and implementation. This is a real world book on architecture and implementation that reflects Rod's own approach and biases to looking at building scalable enterprise systems.
Rating: - A must read for J2EE Developers, and Solution Architects
This is the one if not the only book on the market that can truly serve you as a comprehensive manual for J2EE solution architectures. Every line in this book is worth of gold. It personally helped me justify, reinforce, discover or solidify some very important architectural desicions in my practice.
For instance there is a whole section on presentation tier technology choices. That section covers all of the popular frameworks and technologies (JSP, Struts, XSLT,...).
Each technology is described in terms of what it is, and what are its benefits and drawbacks. Then there is a very good code samples section. Author uses one application throughout the book, and then implements it using various technologies.
Moreover, he suggests you when does it make sense, and when does it not to implement the technology as a solution. It is amazing how much wisdom is built into this book.
Of course some of the APIs covered in the book will be outdated (EJB 2.1), but that does not bother me much. The wisdom is what matters.
Writing in general is very thorough, very practical and reinforced with some very strong real life examples.
Author obviously posseses the maturity and experience that
is so rare to find.
It is a great professional resource, and career builder.
Rating: - Just buy it
Rod Johnson is one of the few technical authors with whom I can almost never disagree. A quick read indicates clearly that his technical insight, which ranges from architectural to low-level coding best practices, are not born of some academic exercise...they are the fruit of actual production J2EE experience...not an academic blueprint. At times, I felt like I was reading my own words. Over the years, I began to wonder if I was the only J2EE developer who was not "drinking all the kool aid." My experience with over a dozen high-volume production applications moved me away from the pure party line. Now, I realize that my religion has a leader. Don't get me wrong, I learned a significant amount from this book. Rod's experience is daunting and even an experienced J2EE developer will glean countless insights from this well-written text.
So what's not to like? Well, frankly, I was disappointed that security got the same level as attention in this book as it does in most - especially since there has yet to be an excellent J2EE text produced on the topic. While I didn't expect Rod to write the definitive tome on authentication and authorization, I expected more than two pages with a collection of URLs for more info. In fact, I loved the fact that he led off the text with testing and was shocked that he didn't follow immediately with security - another system aspect that is frequently relegated to the margins...and often implemented poorly. So how does that influence my review? Well, on Amazon's five star scale, I am taking away one star....but I also started by awarding him ten stars for the rest of the text.
final static int MAX_RATING = 5;
final int rating = Math.min(MAX_RATING, (10-1));
if (rating == 5) {
you.buyNow();
}
Rock on Rod. Can't wait for the "Developing without EJBs" text.
Rating: - Insightful in many ways, but left me hanging
There's no doubt that Rod knows what he's talking about. Much of the book contained best practices that were incredibly valuable, and he seemed to have a focused direction that he wanted to take us in - not just re-hash the J2EE specification.
However, I felt like was left hanging at the end of the book. He talks about a sample application throughout his discussions on design and the source code for the application is available from wrox's (the publisher) website. But after downloading and compiling the application, I discovered that most of the web tier was left incomplete. Apparently, he leaves us to make our own decision about implementing the web-tier, but it would be nice to see at least one option illustrated completely.
All that talk about this sample application and I couldn't even run it and play with it to reinforce what I learned.
|
