Reviews (61)

Disappointed
I am involved in a project to determine the best practices for integrating web services into our applications.We purchased a handful of recommended books on the topic including this one.I have to say that I am disappointed in this book.

First off there is little coverage of web services from an architecture point of view.There are some decent chapters that introduce the concepts of web services and SOA and then the authors jump directly into reference mode on the dozen or so technologies that they think you must master to develop web services.

Maybe it is just a failure of the J2EE process, but this book does little to address the confusion and complexity involved with developing web services in Java.In fact this book just adds to the problem.Developers should not need to know all the details of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and all the JAX APIs in order to develop web services.For the most part, all this plumbing technology should be hidden from developers yet it is the focus of this book.

Book needs a revision
This book disappointed me with belated material and using older java implementations. The content and examples needs lot of updates and confusing the readers. The book suggested website www.webservicesarchitecture.com is not working at all. I find no response from the publisher and author as well.

Reviews (10)

A joy to read but...
This book is required reading for any professional Java developer. Even if you are not convinced of the benefits of test driven development and unit testing you owe it to yourself to check what this is all about. This book will serve as a very hands-on introduction to a lot of APIs, libraries and techniques in the field of unit and integration testing. My only complaint is that it tries to cover too many subjects in too little space. The introductory part on JUnit is superb. I found the treatment of Cactus, surprisingly, too superficial (Vincent Massol is the cactus creator) : the author makes you first (after a brief interlude with Jetty) run the cactus test using Maven, and that would be ok with me if he gave a through introduction to this tool, but instead all you get isa "run the tests typing maven cactus:test". Now this kind of monkey work is not what an intelligent developer loves to do.. and besides when things go even slightly wrong (and you know they will...) you are left clueless. You also get a chance to run cactus tests with ant but the treatment is not general enough to give you a solid understanding of this procedure. Anyhow after reading this book you will be much more competent on software development best practice and testing, but probably wondering if, having to learn and employ all these tools and APIs, unit testing is still useful or is monstrously transforming intoa heavy and complex part of your application...

great coverage of JUnit - get this one
This book really got me moving in the right direction with JUnit.I feel very comfortable writing all kinds of unit tests now and am incorporating my new knowledge into my projects at work.Get this book if you are looking to learn JUnit fast.I gave it 4 stars because it wasn't the best book for reference material.

Reviews (36)

A decent intro to web services
This book is okay as a starting-point in learning Java web services. It attempts to cover a wide range of topics but fails to expand on some subtleties crucial to the understanding ofthese topics. One obvious example of this is the distinction between document-literal binding style and document-based web services. The book touchs on both concepts but stops right there without any explanations on how these concepts are related or not related, what are the implications of choosing a binding-style from the perspective of a web services developer or an admin, whether the choice of a binding-style determines the programming model, the API set, etc.
The authors tend to be loose from time to time with their use of terminologies and concepts. Admittedly, part of this is due to the state of the art of web services itself. That being said, some of the comments in the book are quite confusing and misleading. One example is found on page 454 of the book "JAX-RPC is also a best-fit solution over JAXM ... where high performance ... are defined as the key requirements." This is simply contrary to the common wisdom that loosely-coupled messaging applications usually out-perform their tightly-coupled RPC style counterparts when "performance" is defined as the system throughput. RPC style apps may offer a more predictable response time at the cost of inferior throughput. However, this point was never expanded on with any further information. Similar comments can be found throughout the book.
The writing style of the book is quite verbose and repetitive. Quite often the same point can be found twice or more in one paragraph.
With its shortcomings, the book is still a decent introduction to web services. However, I would recommend supplementing with other online sources. There are many wonderful technical articals on SUN's blueprint site, IBM and Oracle's developer communities.

Don't buy this book!
The other reviews saying "Repetitve and shallow content" are all 100% true.
It repeats itself over and over again. Is not only boring but it's also extremely hard to follow.
I'm an experienced java/jsp developer trying to get into web services, and this book only gave me frustration and disapointment.
When I started reading this book I thought that WS technologies were very complex and hard to understand. Then I realized the only thing hard to understand is this book.

I'm taking this book back to the store.

Reviews (9)

easy to read and useful
If you are working with Struts, Ant, or automated unit testing into your development process,
then this is a book for you.
This book looks at the popular Jakarta applications as
JUnit/Cactus, Struts, and Ant, and shows the most common pitfalls when using
these applications. The book gives
a chapter to Ant and one chapter to JUnit/Cactus and rest to Struts.
Most part of the book is on Struts. The authors discuss potential
problems using Actions, ActionForms, and Struts tag library.

Each pitfall has its own section and is formatted the same as the others.
You get a description of each pitfall, an example of the pitfall in action,
and steps for refactoring it. Corrective solutions are well documented with plenty of code samples
to show both before and after images.

This is a good book on anti-patterns and refactoruing, very good companion of the book <<Rafactorying>> (by Martin Fowler)
and
<<Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Mastering Open Source Tools Including Ant, JUnit, and Cactus>>
(this one covers ant and junit/cactus but not struts)

This book is very readable, some may think it just covers obvious problems, actually, it coveres common pitfalls
that most people forget to escape. It's not a difficult book, but very practical.

The best book on the architectural problems of Struts
If you are designing a large-scaled web application based on Struts, you should read this book first.Reading this book will help you avoid Struts architectural pitfalls and get a better idea what the Struts framework really offers.The pitfalls discussed in this book are all really insightful ,and the solutions suggested by the authors are well-designed and practical.An excellent pitfalls book!

Reviews (46)

Don't waste your time
I bought this book hoping for a quick jumpstart to getting a simple xdoclet/struts app up and running.

The example code from the "Building Struts Apps with Ant and XDoclet" is so bad, it's a disgrace.I spent more time figuring out why their code wasn't even close to working, than I would have if I had just skipped their book altogether.It couldn't work, it never worked, and it shouldn't have been published.

Nice Surprise
I ordered this book based on the title and the preview content here on Amazon (I couldn't find it at the B&N near my work). I was very pleasantly surprised at the practical, nuts-and-bolts approach that the authors took to XP and the tools in this book. I was also extremely pleased at how well the authors showed the integration of these tools into a sophisticated and professional development environment. This is not easy, especially when working with a wide range of tools which includes
* CVS
* Ant
* XDoclet
* JUnit
* JUnitPerf
* Bugzilla
* JMeter
* Cactus
* jcoverage
* Swing testing tools like Jemmy
* Maven
* Anthill

And even though all these tools are O.S., some projects are very territorial (eg they consider other tools to be the competition) so just reading the docs will not always help you choose the right tool for the right job or learn how to use the tools together.

The code I downloaded from the Wrox site was a little rough (some missing files), but the version I downloaded last week was *much* better and has solved all the earlier problems I was having. I'm glad the authors were responsive and willing to release fixes. Great stuff!

Reviews (64)

Great book to start!
The book is excelent because you can learn almost everything related do struts. The book is well written, but has some mistakes.

Struts in Action Provides better insight
Provides excellant insight about the sturts. Eagerly waiting for next edition that covers 1.2x and 1.3.

Reviews (8)

Not good as a boxed set - checkout 007219524X instead
While the first two volumes covered the testing material fairly well, the last two volumes (Fundamentals II & Performance Tuning) compare very poorly to their counterparts published by Oracle Press.I have bought other Sybex study guides, and they have been nothing but good to me.This "kit" comes up a little short.If you must absolutely buy a boxed set for the cost savings, I would recommend Oracle Press's set ISBN 007219524X also available at Amazon.

In the book for Fundamentals II, the coverage of networking, Shared Server and imp/exp is VERY sparse. While the sections onBackups is better, the Oracle Press books were a little more on target in presenting concepts for the exam.

The Oracle Press book for Performance Tuning was a much better choice not only for the exam, but also works as a great reference at my desk.Again, the material and its presentation was more complete and representative of the concepts tested on the exam.

Best OCP
This is definitely the best oracle 9i book in the market.
However, you must use it with the Simulate Exam question.
Otherwise, I think is impossble to pass.

I thinkocpfree/ocpfree1/ocpfree2/ocpfreeX in yahoogroup.com has provide a valuable Exam Simulation all for free.
No need to buy the simulate test.This book + yahoogroups + Study will gurantee you pass.

Really good study guide
Hi,

The content and the style is really comprehensive and easy to understand. The best part is the closeness to the actual exam.

There are so many books to learn about Oracle but by using this book and exam sim from whizlabs, I could easily cracked the exam.

I'll highly recommed it.

Editorial Review

Tom Kyte is of a rare breed. To begin, he's technically expertin his subject (administration of and development of applications forOracle database management systems). What's more (and whatdistinguishes him from the ranks of the super-competent), he is bothable and willing to share his considerable store of wisdom with Oracleusers via books like Expert One on One: Oracle. Perhaps the bestbook about Oracle products ever put out, this book is a model of allaspects of technical publishing: scope, level of detail, clarity ofexplanations, and quality of examples. It's pretty much certain thatyou will learn a great deal about Oracle from Kyte's work, and thatyou'll become more capable in your work as a result of studying thisbook.

Kyte--it's very tempting to call him an Oracle oracle--seemsnot to have had to struggle to fit his message into the Wrox Pressform, which relies on a running commentary interspersed with codelistings and conceptual diagrams. Kyte's commentary is eminentlyinformed and packed with references to the differences between thatwhich is ideal and that which often must be done to accommodatereality. He takes care to explain how little-known pieces of the Oracleenvironment--and alternative ways of looking at the more familiarones--solve problems, an approach that leads to elegant, efficientsolutions. Kyte boosts his readers across the chasm that separatespeople who can write applications for Oracle databases from people whounderstand Oracle databases. --David Wall

Reviews (12)

Best book on market for RMAN and Backups
As a production DBA this is the best book so far since Velpuri wrote the original Oracle 8i backup and recovery book a decade ago. I like this a lot and together with the Oracle documentation, setting up and using RMAN is a snap compared to the pain it used to be to stumble with RMAN before. Throw away logical backups and hassle of SQL backups and use the power of RMAN. I was able to get cooking in a few hours with a good RMAN setup for our test and production database environments. Together with the Oracle 10g RAC book you have the complete knowledge to be a true HA Oracle DBA.

GoodStuff, Piece of Art
I read this book when I was working on my OCP 9i track in 2004. At that time I needed more information about Backup and Recovery and especially Recovery Manager (RMAN)and I ended up borrowing this book from the library. I then put my exam study guide aside and finish this book. The book is really good. The part that I like the most is the book gives you scenarios that are easy to understand and it shows RMAN in different environment interacting with other storage media. I will definitely recommend this book. A book like this one does not come along very often. I am planning to buy my own copy soon. Great Job RG I give 4 stars.