Rating: 
Summary: You can be a near-intermediate WO/EOF programmer!
Review: The very eager to have my own web site that helps me organize many lab chores made me buy WO software. I was shocked at nice interfaces of tools first, and more shocked at little tutorial resources of provider, Apple(though it is very often the case with this company, good product, poor documents/resources) . I've read through this book, which made me a near-intermediate WO programmer. (though becoming a wizard is another-actually learning curve for this framework-especially EOF-seems sigmoidal)Frankly, I think any book like this should be included in the sw package. Vendor should provide much reading/practicing material, I think. This book is well organized, and teaches much of the basic concept and coding/structuring techniques. But, as for me, a novice in this WO field, this book is somewhat hard to follow at first. So I've read whole documents the Apple provided, and then I could follow the way this book points out. Though making distinction is somewhat obscure, this book is for from 1/2 beginners to 3/4 intermediates. To make a long story short, this book won't disappoint you.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but needs a second edition
Review: This book was overall informative, but could really use a second edition. Some parts were hard to follow or confusing, but when used in conjunction with other WebObjects books as well as the WO-Dev mailing list... it has proven beneficial. Hopefully the authors and editors will grace us with an updated version.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly executed
Review: While this book COULD be very good, as the information it tries to convey is useful, it was written as though the authors had other things to do and couldn't spend any time on "readability" issues. There are many grammatical errors and words simply left out or juxtaposed which makes reading what is already fairly complex information that much harder. Perhaps this book suffers from the too many cooks syndrome. Here is an example of bad grammer:
"A solution to this problem is to increase the adaptor timeout value to a value higher than 30 seconds. This requires in order to come up with a permanent solution" After a few re-reads I figured out that simply changing the adaptor timeout value does NOT require modificaions of the application logic, etc. If they only would have started the first sentence "A temporary solution to..." and started the second sentence, "A more permanent solution requires... " it would have made a world of difference, although the phrase "modificaitons of the application logic, web server or database tuning" is still confusing. Do you need to modify, or tune the web server? Here's another example a couple pages later:
"Each entry will have useful statistics about each application instance such as port numbers, unique instance number." The authors should realize how sentences like these can really drain your time and energy when you are trying to understand things, but apparently they don't because these types of sentences show up a LOT. I also echo another reviewer's thought that the book seems to meander from subject to subject with no real flow which doesn't help readability either. That being said, there is still some good info to be found in this book once you decipher it. And that fact that there isn't much competition is why I gave it 3 stars. It's just a shame that they didn't want to put in the effort to get the "little" things right.
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