Rating: 
Summary: Quality of this book causes much confusion.
Review: On the surface this book looks very informative. It does give a broad understanding of J2EE.BUT, I found the numerous errors and typos to be very distracting to the point that I had to write this review. I would bet there are typos on almost every page of text. Some are so bad that I could not understand the entire topic. Others were less obvious until I read other sources that contradicted this book. In other words, I thought I knew the topic until someone else corrected me. Very bad! Despite the reviews that maybe correctly portray the overall book, I highly recommend boycotting this publisher for putting out such a poor quality book. I for one will try my best to never buy a Prentice Hall book again.
Rating:
Summary: the example "webaution" is not working
Review: supposed it uses cloudscape. But actually not, finally I updated the cloud_table.dll users "anno" to "annocloud" and oracle_table users "anno" to "annooracle". and then re-initial the env and restart the servers, only user anno can logon! the user name
is in the program not in the database. How the author can do this??? the application does not use any database. read this book is wasting time!
Rating:
Summary: First Draft
Review: The intent is laudable. The execution is not. This book reads like a first draft. There are numerous errors and typos. It might be worth forgiving these shortcomings if the book covered WebLogic or J2EE well. It doesn't. Save your $$$ -- buy a different J2EE book or wait for a corrected and revised edition.
Rating: 
Summary: great book with excellent coverage of Weblogic
Review: The second edition of this book is an excellent book for getting up to speed on developing applications with Weblogic. It covers the complete J2EE spectrum. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: great book with excellent coverage of Weblogic
Review: The second edition of this book is an excellent book for getting up to speed on developing applications with Weblogic. It covers the complete J2EE spectrum. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The title of the book immediately attracted me to it. However after reading through it over a week-end, it seems to me that none of the topics are covered in any real depth. The documentation on BEA's web-site is probably far better than this book! However this book might be good for someone new to J2EE and/or WebLogic. Overall this book is disappointing!
Rating:
Summary: Lightweight
Review: The title of the book is the immediate draw. I purchased the book online and read thru it this weekend. Upfront, I'd like to say that this book covers J2EE in a survey format. They touch on all of the major topics but they don't drill down. So if you need in-depth coverage on each J2EE technology then you will be better buying a different book. However, the book does show some nice feature of using the Weblogic security API and connection pooling. One thing that I immediately noticed were the large amount of blatant typos. Some of the source code examples are totally incorrect. For example, in the JSP chapter, they have a discussion on handling exceptions with an error page. The JSP code example uses: <%= exception.printStackTrace(); %>. This code will not compile since the authors incorrectly used a JSP expression. The authors of the book did a very good job at explaining EJB. They devoted three chapters to it w/ explanations of Session and Entity beans. The coverage of Message Driven beans was okay...however, they didn't mention the use of selectors w/ Message Driven Beans. It seems that the authors strength is EJB and not servlets/JSP. The servlets and JSP chapters were extremely weak. If you need to learn servlets or JSP then you will be better off buying a book that focuses on servlets and JSP. The information contained in the book could easily be picked up in an on-line tutorial or magazine article. I was a bit surprised that they didn't use the MVC architecture for the Auction application. Instead, they made use of JSPs and custom tags. Since they presented a large number of best practices in the book, they didn't follow one of the leading best practices for web app development...and that's the MVC pattern. I expected to see portions of the WebAuction application developed in each chapter along w/ design and source code. However, each chapter ended w/ a paltry 1-2 paragraph description of the WebAuction component(s). This description didn't contain any source code or UML diagrams. In fact, the full source for the WebAuction application was never completely presented in the book. The authors simply referred you to the CD. The contains a large number of best practices. Most of them were useful. However, a couple of them were either simple-minded or totally unsupported. Here's an example of a best-practice that was listed in the JMS chapter: "Use selectors that only examine message header fields. A selector that examines message properties will be slower, and examining the message body produces the slowest message selectors". The authors do not provide an supporting data for the selector performance. How about some numbers? Also, the piece about examing the message body...well you can't create a selector that examines a message body. The JMS specification states the selectors only work on the JMS headers and properties. Those are some of my big comments. I made note of a lot of others but I'm running out of breath now. I'd recommend that you skim thru the book at a bookstore before you buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Finally a good J2EE book specific to WebLogic
Review: There are a lot of really good books out there dealing with J2EE technologies such as EJB, Servlets/JSP, JMS, etc.. (Like the O'Reilly books). But we didn't have a good book that put it all together in context of the WebLogic Application server, until now. I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this book. Michael Girdley and Rob Woollen are very smart people and people that spend any times in the WebLogic newsgroups know how smart these guys really are. I wasn't sure if that would translate to their writings -- It does. This is a very nicely written book that goes through Servlets, JSP, JDBC/JTA, JMS, RMI, EJB's including Message Beans and WebLogic specific configuration options including clustering and failover. I think this is a great book for beginners as well as advanced users as it is a reference and 'step-by-step' tutorial rolled in one. One of my favorite things about the book is that each chapter is embedded with 'best practices' that contain a lot of useful gems, especially for more advanced users that just skim through the book. The final chapter of the book puts everything that you've learned from the previous chapters together into a complete J2EE application. The sample application, which is included on the CD is a Web-based auction system. A must-read for anyone that wants to learn everything they need about J2EE.
Rating: 
Summary: Beginner only J2EE. Not enough depth on WebLogic server
Review: This book covers topics for beginner J2EE developers which are covered better in books on those topics. JSP and servlets for example are well represented in depth by other books. So why cover these and other topics that are not really specific to the WebLogic server? Sure there are some differences in how WebLogic implements some of these features but it's easily learned through the documentation. What's really needed is a detailed analysis of WebLogic server with reasonably complex examples that are thoroughly explained. The workbook style of the book with step by step instructions to complete the examples, DOS Windows showing the results of running simple DOS batch file or directories again illustrates the beginner level of the book. I mean why do we need large graphics of login screens, or pictures of the console. This is just filler. I'm also not a fan of Prentice Hall's publishing style with large margins, big font, thick pages, poor graphics and source code that is word wrapped instead of using smaller fonts. This book could have easily been reduced by at least half. Overall I cannot recommend this book for anyone who has some working knowledge of WebLogic server. Beginners depending on your skill set will find it useful to some degree.
Rating:
Summary: Wide Covering but hurt by errors
Review: This book does cover a wide variety of content, however it is harmed by the numerous typos and errors. I had counted 15 in just the first few chapters. Although the major example application covers a great deal of information, the explanation is scattered through out the book in bits and chunks and there is no real clear explanation of the setup for weblogic to run the application. I would have preferred a more step by step process of building the auction application. It uses 6.0 so be aware that some of the screen shots that are important ( i.e. securty set-up) , won't match the current version of weblogic. I suppose it's hard to get something published and be current on the latest versions, so it's no ones fault, just be aware of it. Also several of the ejbs won't compile since they use an out of date version of the DTD. You will need to change the xml descriptors to use the newer element names to match the DTD. I would have also preferred they use ANT instead of dos batch files to compile. I think this is an important part of real world developement.
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