JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide

Normally, I would have waited until I had worked through all the examples in the book. However, I am somewhat concerned with the two very negative reviews published recently by persons who have totally misjudged the value proposition of this book.This book never promises to be a reference manual type book listing ins and outs of JBoss configuration. It is stated in the preface and the opening chapter in black and white. Using JBoss as a vehicle, it is teaching very subtle but all-important J2EE concepts. After all, JBoss IS a J2EE server. Without J2EE applications, it has no use. I do agree that some of the deployment tasks are missing from the Ant build files in the downloads from the book's web site (specifically colddeploy). It should not matter though. Bring the server down, copy the EAR file to the deploy directory, and bring it back up. It does the same thing. You DO need some previous knowledge and experience with some J2EE containers, e.g., WebLogic, WebSphere etc. to benifit from this book though. It is NOT book for rand beginners. If you do have some prior experience with J2EE containers and are NOT specifically looking for comprehensive reference material on JBoss configuration/tuning etc. then this book begins to be very useful. It may have to do with how people learn however. I personally like the presentation style and the material presented in this book very much.

I was looking for a guide for JBoss application server from a beginer's point of view (I have been working with Weblogic for several years but not JBoss) and bought this book since it was rated so high. However, after I finished reading the book, I felt very disappointed since this book talks so little for JBoss! Instead, it puts most of the content on J2EE programming, how to develop 3-tier application, and MVC framework etc. I am not buying this book to learn J2EE techniques!!! What I want to know is how JBoss is managing all its services, how to config different settings, what logging mechanisms are provided (general, JDBC, http, etc.), or how to tune the performance of a JBoss server. Unfortunately, thost topics are either just mentioned slightly (like logging in appendix B), or not there at all.In summary, if you are a beginner for J2EE and want to start your development with JBoss, this book might be good for you. Don't expect to find more information of JBoss from it! I am a fan of O'Reilly books, but this one is not one of them!

"JBoss at Work" is a great overview of a broad spectrum of product technologies. It spends enough time on each to get them working and to provide a feel for their value, customizability, and flexibility. Examples are well-presented and contain discussion about how they work and are configured for multiple populare application environments, where appropriate. It has excellent background and history for each technology, popular alternatives, and a discussion about why the author preferred this particular technology. In other words, the authors provide more than just the bare mention included in many "survey" books. There is enough to get all of them working, and working together as a cohesive set. It does not, however, provide a lot of detail on each one.This was perfect for my needs -- to provide a strong enough introduction for me to understand into which technologies I wanted to delve deeper, and enough contact with each of them to allow me to evaluate competing technologies in their space.

If you need a tutorial review of how to put together a web application using J2EE technologies including JSP, servlets, JDBC, Hiberate, EJB, JNDI, JAAS, and web services then you may find this book moderately useful (and if this is what I had bought the book for, I might have given it a slightly higher rating). As for JBoss, yes, it is the application server used in the book to deploy these technologies, but once you have finished the book you will be left with the feeling that you barely learned anything about JBoss itself.Also note that the companion files and scripts you download need a few minor updates to make them work as described in the book (as of December 28, 2005). There is nothing more frustrating than being asked to run an Ant script that is missing the option you are being asked to execute. While this wasn't a showstopper, it is sloppy work and not something one expects from an O'Riley book.

I am a programmer with a number of years experience spanning IBMmainframe assembler through Java.I left industry to pursue research in biology and spend much of my time reading and getting up to speed on that side of things. When I need to make use of an unfamiliar programming technology, there is neither the time nor the money for training. JBoss at work was the perfect book to allow me to get a reasonable J2EE implementation off the ground. The example project provided a perfect skeleton of most of the features I needed to implement a plate management system that is being used for cancer research in a joint project between universities.

I am most of the way through this book and so far, it's been extremely helpful and informative. It breaks all the steps down one by one and takes you from a simple Hello-World type app, to a more complicated enterprise application. A great read all-around.

I've built a number of J2EE/Servlet/JSP web applications over the past many years but was never formally trained in OO techiniques nor had any formal Java training. I'm very much a hands on learner and this book fits very well with the way I like to attack things. Some commenters wished for a book more focussed on JBoss particulars but for me the project management stuff and the use of Ant and Xdoclet are a big plus. I "get things" best by looking at code and scripts and this book delivers that.I think it's a really swell book.

For beginners - how to install and set up - excellent. If you are more advanced user it will be better for you to look for source code.