Rating: 
Summary: Great for Novice, Too
Review: Come to think of it, it is one of the *only* books of its genre. I mean, I picked this massive missive up, and I groaned as I contemplated its gravitas. It has all of the things that you would want in a book that deals with JDeveloper: words, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, thoughts, insights, tips, master codes that give the developer invincibility and unlimited armor, and a subtle bouquet. The Iliad, Plato's Republic, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, Oracle9i JDeveloper Handbook: they all share some of these qualities.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent source for newbies or JVeterans
Review: I am actually a Lotus Notes programmer by trade (OK, stop laughing!) who has been dabbling with a variety of other programming languages for many years (C++, Java, VB, C#, etc), so I have had some exposure to Object Oriented programming and developer GUI's going back to GWBasic. I have also recently begun to dabble with Oracle 8i and 9i, installing them on my laptop and on a Linux box so that I would have Oracle available to me as a learning resource. I am by no stretch of the imagination a programming wizard, but I can quickly make myself useful in any programming environment with good reference material as my starting point.I recently decided that I needed to try to put myself in a better position in the job market by extending my working knowledge of both Java and Oracle. Oracle JDeveloper appeared to be the best tool for accomplishing this objective and the Oracle 9i JDeveloper Handbook has proven to be an excellent learning source for such a vast product. There are several factors that make JDeveloper a complex and powerful tool. First of all, it allows you to create and edit all things Java -- from basic Java classes and simple Java console applications, to JavaBeans, JSP pages, Swing/AWT Java applications and applets, Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), servlets, you name it. Additionally, the JDeveloper product has a class modeling tool that at first I thought was just for drawing UML diagrams, but it actually can be used the way that UML is supposed to be used -- to produce actual database tables that embody the properties that you specify in the JDeveloper GUI. All of this functionality is already a massive undertaking but then you add on to that the use of Oracle Business Components for Java (BC4J) and things get really hairy. Probably one of the most difficult things to wrap my brain around is the BC4J architecture, not because it is confusing but because it is very powerful and seems to be very extensive and very well thought out. I can say this because in the JDeveloper Handbook the examples and the scenarios that are used to explain the BC4J object model and architecture effectively convey the benefit and flexibility of using BC4J. JDeveloper is very integrated with the Oracle database platform. It very quickly and easily can read your database tables and do a lot of the grunt work of putting an object model over your database structures using BC4J. And, as I mentioned earlier, you can "forward engineer" your tables by creating your UML diagrams first and using those to create the underlying database tables (aren't tables just there to enable the object model to persist?). As I continued through the book, the BC4J concepts (which I must emphasize are a very important part of this product) become more and more familiar and I see their value more and more. This is all to say that the JDeveloper tool is much more extensive than I first realized and obviously has a very high level of integration with the Oracle database platform. There is a lot of ground to cover and this book methodically plods through it. For newbie's, it covers everything from using the IDE to debugging, with plenty of examples for creating a wide variety of the different kinds of projects JDeveloper supports. For old Java veterans, I think what you'll appreciate the most is the material on BC4J and how much easier it's going to make your Java / Oracle programming. The book covers it all at what I feel is a good level of detail with a lot of examples and scenarios that make the concepts clear and useful. I am really glad I bought this book and I have only read half-way through it! I know I will be reading every page and will continue to refer to it for all the different kinds of examples that it covered. There is no way I could have tapped into half of the power of this tool without this book. Thanks to Peter Koletzke, Dr. Paul Dorsey, and Dr. Avrom Faderman for effectively taking on such massive challenge.
Rating:
Summary: First comprehensive overview on BC4J
Review: i have only studied the parts on oracle's business components for java. the concepts and the use of bc4j are explained very good and useful for people who are not j2ee-experts.
it helps me alot in developing bc4j-based applications. trevi
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best way to learn JDeveloper
Review: I have to be honest, when I first picked up this heavy
book (with two hands mind you) I sighed at noticing it was almost 1000
pages. Those discouraging feelings were short lived after a quick look at
the Table of Contents. The book accurately delivers everything a developer would need to get
started in writing and designing production quality applications. I cannot
say enough about how well organized the content and examples are with this
book. Below are only a small handful of the reasons I will be recommending
this book to my colleagues. 1.) Great flow. Many books with multiple authors don't effectively flow. In
some cases, the authors often contradict each other. Not the case with this
book. The writing style is extremely consistant.
2.) In depth coverage on BC4J, application development methodologies with
JDeveloper, debugging, Java Client / JSP development, and deployment
considerations.
3.) The examples are first-rate. All of the examples accurately clarify the
subject matter.
4.) It covers EVERYTHING you would need to know and nothing more. In short, this book is the most efficient way to learn Oracle JDeveloper. Regards,
-- jeff
---------------------------------------
Jeffrey Hunter, OCP
Senior Database Administrator
http://www.idevelopment.info
---------------------------------------
Rating: 
Summary: Missed Opportunities
Review: I received this book as a gift after I made it known I wanted to learn how to use Oracle's JDeveloper. When I began reading it, I winced over the cautions about who should read the book. Although I am proficient in Access and have done some VBScript and JavaScript client-side applications, I am new to J2EE and to Oracle. However, I hoped that reading the book would give me a good explanation of the basics of JDeveloper and that I could fill in the holes later. Unfortunately, the book did not provide many explanations of the basics and some of those attempts were pretty vague. For instance, it was not until somewhere shortly after page 400 that the distinction between Views and Entities became clear. In reviewing the earlier 'explanations' with the benefit of hindsight, they still did not seem to be very clear about what was just pointers and what held actual data.
The authors could, with very little additional effort, have provided short, clear explanations for basic concepts. That would have greatly improved the readability for a wider range of readers. It was this failure to provide better explanations of the basics that led me to title this review, "Missed Opportuniites".
Rating:
Summary: Missed Opportunities
Review: I received this book as a gift after I made it known I wanted to learn how to use Oracle's JDeveloper. When I began reading it, I winced over the cautions about who should read the book. Although I am proficient in Access and have done some VBScript and JavaScript client-side applications, I am new to J2EE and to Oracle. However, I hoped that reading the book would give me a good explanation of the basics of JDeveloper and that I could fill in the holes later. Unfortunately, the book did not provide many explanations of the basics and some of those attempts were pretty vague. For instance, it was not until somewhere shortly after page 400 that the distinction between Views and Entities became clear. In reviewing the earlier 'explanations' with the benefit of hindsight, they still did not seem to be very clear about what was just pointers and what held actual data.
The authors could, with very little additional effort, have provided short, clear explanations for basic concepts. That would have greatly improved the readability for a wider range of readers. It was this failure to provide better explanations of the basics that led me to title this review, "Missed Opportuniites".
Rating:
Summary: Great for Novice, Too
Review: I'm new to rapid development tools and to BC4J, and I found this book very helpful in developing a Java application with Swing
components and especially with BC4J. There are exercises that are very helpful
in demonstrating many of the concepts, and I recommend doing those exercises if the concepts are at all new to you. (They also summarize "what just happened" after you do an exercise which is helpful since you can sometimes lose the big picture in all the keystrokes.) I focused a lot on the BC4J chapters. Although this book does not claim to teach Java, it does have a chapter which describes the main concepts of Java needed to use JDeveloper. I found this book very well written and organized.
Rating:
Summary: Clear and useful guidebook
Review: If you're starting to work with JDeveloper, this is a very useful book. I suspect it would also be helpful to people who've been working with it and have run into snaffus . The text is clear without being condescending and the examples are easy to follow . The overview section of J2EE architecture is nicely demystifying, and the second part of the book (the in depth discussion of BC4J) is very well written and clear. Sure, you can learn JDev without this handbook, but messing about with it until you do is NOT an efficient way to learn it. For people who have real deadlines and real people depending on them for Java-based ap development, this book is fantastic.
Rating:
Summary: JSP
Review: This book covers only the basic concepts and is very similar to JDeveloper help.
I was going through the JSP examples that
are included in this book. This book has examples how to create a List of Value.
It does not allow saving a record once you select an item from a list.
It really does not work. I found this book is little helpful but one can get that
help from JDeveloper help.
Rating:
Summary: Clear and useful guidebook
Review: This book is GREAT. It does exactly what it says it does. It covers JDeveloper in depth. There is a whole section on BC4j (the guts of the product). Of course it doesn't cover Java, SQLJ or JDBC. There are loads of books on those topics. The book is 1000 pages as it is. To develop using JDev, you need Java, SQLJ, JDBC, XML, etc. Do you expect to get all of that in one book? Read the intro, it SAYS that it doesn't cover those topics. It won't teach you French either.
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