Rating: 
Summary: Don't make the same mistake as I .......
Review: This book promotes SonicMQ. That's it. The end. You are paying for a SonicMQ manual. This book doesn't even go over the Sun Java Message Que, only SonicMQ. ( That's because David Chappell hosts the SonicMQ developers Exchange. ) He even has the nerve to go into how to use the SonicMQ Explorer tool ! ! The authors give code snippets for how to setup the JNDI context for, you've guessed it, SonicMQ.( they also provide a snippet for BEA, but, then, so does every O'Reilly book ) Geesh, at least realize that there are other message providers out there that could use the same 5 lines of examples too. After all, the authors did list all of the JMS providers, why not include code snippets to get examples to work with them ? I guess O'Reilly, wants to only focus with certain companies, SonicMQ and BEA. Here's the sad thing about this book. After I downloaded and installed Sun's Java Message Que, I could understand JMS and didn't need to spend the money on this book. Sun's online tutorial was all that's needed and their documentation puts this book to shame. This book should be titled " Developing JMS with SonicMQ ".
Rating: 
Summary: A good no-nonsense explanation of Java Message Service
Review: This is a book with 200 pages of easy to read material that gets right to the point. It delivers basic knowledge about JMS but it is not any advanced text on the subject. Chapter 1 present the basic concepts about Message-Oriented Middleware. Chapter two introduce you to JMS programming by the help of a simple code example. The size of the programming code feels appropriate and illustrates the concepts well. Chapter 3 dwells on the actual message. Chapter 4 and 5 takes a close look at Publish-and-Subscribe messaging respectively Point-to-Point messaging by the help of code examples. These chapters are built around two code examples that contain the necessary code for illustrating the subject, and no more. Chapter 6 is about the important concept of guaranteed messaging. Chapter 7 tries to cover a lot of important topics, such as performance, scalability and security, but it only scratches the surface and does not give you much value. Chapter 8 cover J2EE and JMS. Again, this chapter is a bit thin and there are more to say about this subject. For instance, there is a very brief introduction to the use of message-driven beans in EJB 2.0, but does not give any example of how to solve the problem of consuming asynchronous messages in EJB 1.1. The appendix is a quick reference guide to Java Message Service API and Messages. I found it quit useful after reading the book. I would recommend this book as the first book to read about JMS. It gives you basic knowledge about JMS without being unnecessary wordy and provides simple and easily grasped code examples.
Rating:
Summary: delightfull introduction, good first book on JMS
Review: This little book is a great "first" book on JMS, written by chief architects of the leading JMS implementations in both open source and commercial community. It lays down theoretical foundations of messaging middleware, introduces publish-subscribe, P2P, multicast, and the transaction-related considerations; thoroughly covers JMS spec (however simple this thing is) and its touch-points with EJB and J2EE. Example applications are simple, well understood and well supported. However, coverage of such topics as transactivity, recovery, messaging system design are somewhat shallow; section on JMS providers is unbearably thin, with any critical component lacking; and the performance and scalability issues with both JMS Spec itself and a variety of its commercial application is lacking in depth. I would recommend this book to a college student taking an advance computer science course; computer professional learning about messaging and JMS - but it is not in any way an advanced text on the subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent starter book
Review: With a computer programming and distributed systems background, but no knowledge of the JMS API or experience with MOM-based solutions this book not only introduced the concepts but gave me tangible code that I could use to get off the ground quickly. The book doesn't appear to cover JMS-provider specific information such as setup or translation of any JMS-terms to provider-specific terms but it does an excellent job of introducing the concepts w/ advice and code from the JMS-view. The book also does a good job of staying concise if time is of importance.
Rating:
Summary: SonicMQ marketing broschure
Review: You should better read the JMS spec and the JMS tutorial from the JavaSoft JMS site. This book here is a SonicMQ marketing broschure and nothing more.
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