Rating: 
Summary: A little better than Sun's JMS Tutorial
Review: So, about the book. I had hoped to find suggestions as to
how to optimize JMS throughput. Chapter 7, "Deployment Considerations" should have provided some help.
It asked more questions than it answered and offered no
specific solutions. Overall, I got a little more out of the book than I did
reading [their] site and tutorial.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful, practical, useful
Review: As someone who has participated in design and development of a commercially available JMS compliant messaging product I can wholehertedly reccommend this book as a starting point for anyone interested in MOM or JMS. It contains enough technical detail to be valuable for engineers and enough strategic information to be useful for managers interested in answering 'why' and 'how'.
The best thing about this book is the balance it strikes between detail and generality. The authors do a great job of introducing the topics and describing the general JMS approach to dealing with it. Then they illustrate the concept using examples culled from specific industry implementations. The candid manner in which discrepencies beween vendor implementations, the JMS spec and the practicallity of developing something 'that works' makes this a very well-balanced read.
Rating: 
Summary: A specification Digest
Review: For me the book had little value. I would have been interested if it had offered some insight and/or examples into ways to set up a distributed system ( jms servers on two systems ) using various protocols. The examples and configurations discussed were the sames as those you would find at javasoft; nothing beyond a star configuration. JNDI is also a very important aspect of the JMS solution which was only thinly covered. There seems to be a whole series of these kind of books comming out of O'Reilly. Books that are similarly disappointing are the book on threads, beans and JDBC. Again each of these books fail to take the topic beyond the specification. O'Reilly does have some very fine books, especially the Nutshell books, but some just don't have value.
Rating: 
Summary: Great jump start on JMS
Review: I actually got the book free from Progress (SonicMQ) however I feel this book is worth the money for anyone wanting to get up and going quickly on JMS. The only grip I have is that all of the examples require a connection to a JNDI server. The book doesn't even cover how to do this locally (via TCP/IP). Since I'm running SonicMQ locally on my laptop I don't have the luxury of a LDAP server(or some other service). After looking at the examples provided by SonicMQ I was able to hack together pieces from the book and the SonicMQ examples to make the examples in the book work.
Rating:
Summary: JMS all you need is this book
Review: I bought this book because I needed it for a project. If you need a consise and easy to read. It covers all you need to know to write your code this book is for you. There are other books with 600+ pages which cost more $$. It has links to JMS providers that you can use to run the sample code. The code is simple but to the point. I was able to compile the code without much changes. I would have give it 5 if it had one or two more chapters with more advanced samples.
Rating:
Summary: Hits the mark
Review: I found this book to be a very informative and accurate description of JMS. Having studied the JMS spec in great detail, I thought I knew everything there was to know about it. However, this book spells it out very clearly, puts it together in a way that is easily digestible. It explains the concepts clearly and continually builds on them with working examples as it goes. It provides information on subtleties like why and why not one would use the TopicRequestor object, and provides a very thorough discussion on guaranteed messaging, store-and-forward, and message acknowledgements. It gives a good overview of the popular JMS vendors. In the preface it mentions that the technical reviewers for the book consisted in part of representatives from a number of JMS vendors. It is good to know that one of the co-authors of this book is from the SonicMQ team. Based on the level of detail described in the book, and the extensive list of names in the acknowledgements section, it is clear that David Chappell made good use of expert advice from the SonicMQ engineering team, and from the Sun team (Joe Fialli is the technical lead for Sun's JMS reference implementation). This book is not just a point of view from 2 guys who read a spec and regurgitated it. It is clear that it contains valuable and accurate information on a technology than from the engineers who built an implementation of it - from SonicMQ, Sun's JMS reference implementation, and other JMS vendors.
Rating:
Summary: I recommend it. It delivers solid useful foundational info.
Review: I needed to learn JMS for use on a project using WebSphere MQ and MQ Integrator (formerly MQSeries and MQSeries Integrator). This book did the job. The book provides multiple bug-free sample programs starting with a simple Chat and moving on to more involved B2B examples. The examples added complexity at a pace that was right for me. It provides discussions on the use of different programming patterns explaining not just how the Java classes work, but making recommendations on how best to use them. The book sticks to platform independent JMS (as expected) showing SonicMQ screens occasionally. I used several IBM Redbooks and the MQ product manuals to get the platform specific parts configured.
Rating:
Summary: I recommend it. It delivers solid useful foundational info.
Review: I needed to learn JMS for use on a project using WebSphere MQ and MQ Integrator (formerly MQSeries and MQSeries Integrator). This book did the job. The book provides multiple bug-free sample programs starting with a simple Chat and moving on to more involved B2B examples. The examples added complexity at a pace that was right for me. It provides discussions on the use of different programming patterns explaining not just how the Java classes work, but making recommendations on how best to use them. The book sticks to platform independent JMS (as expected) showing SonicMQ screens occasionally. I used several IBM Redbooks and the MQ product manuals to get the platform specific parts configured.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference and Practical JMS book
Review: I really liked this book and it was very helpful for me as a reference on my desk. I am using this a lot for implementing JMS in my applications.The information is presented much more clearly than the JMS specifications. My only recommendation would be that some UML diagrams would have been helpful to add value to the book.
Rating:
Summary: Invaluable!
Review: If you are not born as a JMS expert ... If you hate reading dry specs ... If you need to get up to speed on JMS quickly ... If you want to know what to look/ask for when evaluating JMS ... If you learn best by playing with examples (anybody out there who doesn't?)... ... this is the book for you. This book discusses JMS as it applies to real business applications and needs. The spec can't give you that. Invaluable if you ask me!
| 
