Jayne said
I'm a java programmer (10+ years) and I've been trying to make the leap to web services but most of these book put me to sleep by explaining every new term in great detail. zzzzzzzz!
This one dives in and gets you started, explaining things as you go along. Its so much easier for me to retain something when I can actually see it in action.
Once I'm done reading this one, I'll go back to the boring books and see what they have to add once I'm more familiar with everything.
F. Morstatter said
I really like this product. It's a concise tutorial for beginners on some very important aspects of Java EE using glassfish.
One thing I would like to see is the appendixes updated for modern versions of the IDEs. The tutorials are still usable, just a little old.
Pierre Clement said
In under 400 pages, the author managed to do a pretty good job at introducing both what's in Java EE 5 and using it on GlassFish.
If you already know EE and GlassFish and want a specific topic covered in details, then you're probably better off picking a book on just that. Again, this book has JSF, JMS, EJBs, security, web services, and so on, but just enough to cover what most people will want and still keep it in a manageable number of pages.
Well worth my money - I don't regret buying and reading cover to cover.
Rich Rosen said
I concur with the readers who say this book isn't just an "intro to Glassfish", that it's more of a "summary of the components of the Java EE 5 specification with emphasis on how to configure and use those components specifically with Glassfish". And that was just fine with me, because I was kind of looking for both, and in this book I got both.
We considered Glassfish as a platform of choice for deployment of a revised/updated version of a sample application (for a new edition of a book). We wound up backing off from using Java EE 5 and stuck with J2EE 1.4, for a variety of reasons. In going through this book, though, I discovered it summarizes numerous aspects of Java EE 5 in brief, readable, understandable form. The chapters on JDBC, JSTL, JSF, JMS, and EJB3 were concise summaries that covered the material well and offered solid examples. Each of these topics has had whole books dedicated to them, so it's nice to see a book that wraps itself around these individual topics and conveys the essence of what they're about succinctly.
Usually the books that attempt to cover EVERYTHING in something as broad as a J2EE/Java EE spec call themselves "bibles", and indeed that's a good name for them as they attempt to be the canonical be-all and end-all on the subject with enough laborious text and sideline commentary to be considered "biblical". While none of the chapters here is a deep thorough tutorial, each one provides enough information for you to get your head around the topic at hand, leaving with enough understanding to seek out deeper information elsewhere. That's an important thing for a book like this to do, and it's not something to be scoffed at or dismissed. In my day job I'm working with JBoss 4.2 using Java EE 5 features like EJB3 and JMS, and this book provided useful information on those subjects clearly and concisely, and explained more than a few things to me that I hadn't gotten before. The chapter at the end on Facelets, Ajax4Jsf, and Seam provided very brief overviews of those approaches/packages, again just enough to explain aspects I hadn't understood.
I may use Glassfish in the future for personal projects, as it looks like it is a robust implementation of the Java EE 5 spec, and this book will definitely be a good guide to development and deployment of Java EE 5 apps for that environment.
Zachary M. Smith said
I had pretty high hopes for this book but I'm pretty bummed out. It seems well written and I'm sure it is good for some people but just about everything in this book is available for free elsewhere. I wanted a book about GlassFish and really specific stuff like configuring a domain *in detail* and not a recap on how to run the basic commands. JNDI in GlassFish - I don't think it's covered. Writing applications with the Java Web Start and the nice appclient utility - not covered. Sure, most of that is mentioned (as in...the words are used) but basically this book is for people who want to learn how to write the simplest servlet, ejb, and web service and with the exception of the security chapter, pretty much none of it is really specific to glassfish. Oh well. I'll probably refer to this book on occasion when something isn't working and I want to check my sanity but for the most part this will sit under my much better books on EJB and JEE in general.
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