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Rating: 
Summary: Errors, no diagrams. Good parts, could have been better.
Review: "J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server" by Girdley, Woollen, and Emerson, is a book that I had been waiting for. "Professional J2EE Programming with BEA WebLogic Server" by Gomez and Zadrosky kept me hungry for the 'beef', and I knew that Woollen is one of the good answerers on the BEA newsgroups. It's a fat book of 15 chapters in over 600 pages plus CD, covering all the J2EE technologies. It begins with an overview of J2EE technologies, and then goes thru each of them: servlets, JSPs, JDBC, RMI, JNDI, JMS, EJB 2.0, JavaMail, and security, followed by two chapters on production deployment and capacity planning, and one outlining an example application, a web auction. Each of the J2EE technology chapters presents some small programs illustrating the technology, followed by some advice for design decisions. There are some WebLogic-specific topics like clustering, entity locking, and the WebLogic security service, but in the main the material is not specific to a J2EE product.The strategy of using small disconnected "Hello World" programs to illustrate each of the technologies is good. Other books reject that strategy because such programs are not realistic. Those books are not readable selectively. In addition to the small examples, this book also has a larger, more realistic example. A separate chapter is devoted to it and it's on the CD.
Practical examples illustrate common tasks such as login verification. Throughout the book, the authors highlight tricks and unobvious traps.
I am happy to see the two chapters on deployment and about capacity planning. These are important topics that are frequently ignored or neglected. This information cannot be learnt from reading the J2EE specs and mustn't be left to guesswork.
The best area of the book are the chapters about EJBs. They explain the standard EJB behaviour, and the extra WebLogic functionalities like clustering and the use of WebLogic CMP. I appreciate practical advice that goes beyond what the spec says, for example how to write primary key classes, and how to use read-mostly entities. Unfortunately, one wishes some content and its presentation were better. The presented technologies are not motivated enough. Before I read how to program a servlet, I want to know why I want to program a servlet.
The book does not compare and criticise the technologies enough. It should compare and criticise choices like basic athentication, form-based authentication, or certificate authentication for web access. It is not enough to say how to program them.
The book uses very few diagrams, and no UML at all! Concepts like the relations between the three or more interfaces and classes that make up an EJB can be presented so much clearer by just a few small pictures. It's obviously not a question of space: we see many superfluous pictures of DOS consoles executing deployment scripts.
The few diagrams in the book have several errors. For example in the deployment chapter, they contradict the text and therefore confuse. The diagram on page 568 gives "code" as the first stage in J2EE application development. Sigh.
The quality of the technical writing in this book is variable.
Don't read the JSP Chapter. If I didn't know how JSPs work already, I'm not sure I would have understood it from this chapter. There's grammar without definitions, like "import= " { package . class | package .* } , ... "". I could not guess what that is supposed to mean. The deployment descriptors are partly wrong. Class names are badly formatted. There are sentences like "out is a subclass of ..." --- it's not a subclass, it's an object of course. While it may seem fussy of me to criticise the wording at this level, this level is exactly where the reader spends unnecessary effort. An inexperienced reader may misunderstand the sentence completely. The chapter does not explain clearly what a JSP is and how it is executed. The chapter has become superfluous: Those readers who are able to understand it already know its contents.
There is a lot of badly formatted and incorrect code in this book. I won't go into details, except to mention the ridiculous pages 454/455 where we are surprised with:
abstract "C:\WINNT\Profiles\michaelg\javax\mail\Address.html" [] "C:\WINNT\Profiles\michaelg\javax\mail\Message.html" \l "getFrom()" () Returns the From Attribute.
It was supposed to be a repetition of the JavaDoc of javax.mail.Message, so it is superfluous anyway. In any programming book, the code has to be correct and it has to be beautiful, even more so than the narrative text. Who should buy this book? If this is your first book on J2EE, you'll be partly confused by it. As a beginner's intro to J2EE it is not detailed enough, and not pedagogical enough. If you read this after a J2EE tutorial and together with the specs and the WebLogic online doc, you'll gain quite a bit from it. If you're looking for critical assessment of J2EE helping you to decide on technical questions like which transaction isolation level to set, whether to use stateful session beans or HttpSession attributes, you'll find some help in this book. Maybe not as much as I had hoped for. If you want specific hints and tricks about using WebLogic: the book has little more than BEA's generally good online documentation. Verdict Many weaknesses can easily be fixed in a corrected edition. The next edition must eliminate the typos and add diagrams. The book has good parts, but it could have been a lot better. Of course many WebLogic developers will buy it regardless!
Rating: 
Summary: A must-read for any new Weblogic Developer
Review: A great way to learn J2EE if you are looking to use Weblogic as your application server. Most of the examples are clear easy to follow. I definitely recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Who Proofed this?
Review: Answer: No one. While this book is fairly comprehensive in its coverage of developing J2EE applications on WebLogic Server, it appears to be thrown together. It looks like no one proof read the book. Paragraphs and examples are repeated or nearly repeated within pages, fonts change. This has all the markings of a first draft. BEA and Michael Girdley should insists on a higher quality job if there is ever a second edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Demonstrates WebLogic EJB programming best practices
Review: I agree with most of the reviewers who gave this book a 4-start rating. In spite of the obvious weakness in covering servlets and JSP's, it nevertheless does an excellent job discussing various aspects of developing and deploying EJB's with WebLogic Server 6.0, which for most part is what WebLogic Server is meant for (for pure servlets and JSP work, I'd rather save some money by using JRun, Tomcat, or Resin, don't you agree?). For intermediate and advanced EJB programmers, you should be quite happy to see some of the intricate points in designing and fine-tuning entity EJB's are covered here. As with some of the earlier reviewers, I would also like to draw your attention the "Best Practices" sections in many of the chapters. These are real-world experience given by BEA insiders that you typically don't get in general EJB texts. The WebAuction sample app also adds value to the book by nicely tying all concepts (JSP, custom tags, all flavors of EJB's, JMS, and JavaMail) together. Even though it doesn't demo how to use a MVC framework in the web-tier and does not use the local interface features in the EJB-tier, and the Java classes' package hierarchy is a bit simplistic, the application is quite well architected, In fact, I was able to modify it easily by incorporating the Apache Struts framework and changing to local interface for all EJB's. To sum up, the book is definitely valuable to people who moved to WebLogic from another app server, and to those who are moving from EJB 1.x to 2.0, in addition to serving J2EE/EJB "newbies".
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this (updated review)
Review: Last fall when I first reviewed this book it was the first Weblogic 6.x book available and the best of breed at the time despite being deeply flawed because the proofreading was poor and most of the examples required fixing before they would work. I may have been the first person to go through this book in detail and I provided detailed eratta to the authors which they published on their website. Today the website appears to be gone. You will be much better off buying Monson-Haefel's Enterprise Javabeans 3rd edition and downloading the Weblogic 6.1 workbook from his website than buying this book now. This is the way to go for a Weblogic beginner IMHO. The best overall EJB book now is the Ed Roman book from the Middleware Company. I am looking forward to an updated version of this book covering the new Weblogic 7.0 (Cajun) product however.
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: Excellent
Review: This book is an excellent survey of WebLogic Server 8.1 and, more generally, building applications with J2EE. It describes each of the functional areas of the server - JSP and servlets, EJBs, JMS, JDBC, security, administration, etc. It also reviews other technologies, such as web services, XML, and SOA, and how they relate to J2EE. The example application is thorough and useful. This is an excellent book for someone new to WebLogic Server and J2EE or an expert looking to polish skills.
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