IBM(R) WebSphere(R) System Administration

Rating:
Summary: Moving beyond the Admin Console
Review: Once you have used the admin console.... it's pretty easy. I then started to move over to running commands from the command line within the 'bin' directory. This book takes the administrator past this into the scripting realm. You can get an excellent handle on using Wsadmin scripts just by modifying some of the many examples presented in this book.

I found this book to be more of a solid reference manual for the WebSphere Administrator. It has several scripts for common tasks. In addition, you will find quick reference charts for taks, functions and AdminControl commands (to mention a few). I would consider this book to be an essential quick reference guide for any WebSphere Application Server administrator.

Rating:
Summary: Big improvements over Version 4
Review: The authors describe Version 5 of the WebSphere Application Server in straightforward terms. They contrast it with the now passe Version 4. The changes are manifold enough that even if you have run a V4 system, much of this book will be new and useful to you.

Amusingly, the Foreword talks of V4 as "unstable, unextensible, inconsistent across editions". Whew! Kudos for the belated candour. I doubt if any extant V4 literature described it in such terms.

If you're totally new to WebSphere sysadmining, then the book clearly requires that you be familiar with XML, EJBs, SOAP and JMX, at a minimum. It goes quickly into using these, with little preamble setup. Quite understandable from the authors' vantage, but you need to be prepared.

A big change from V4 is the extensive use of JMX. Reassuring for JMX. It's been around some 3 years. Good to see an important package like WebSphere using it. Seems that the V4 combination of EJBs and a relational database to hold parameters may have been too slow. Too heavyweight perhaps for the task? EJBs can have a big computational or network cost. Anyway, V5 replaced these with XML files and JMX. Much faster perhaps.

Scripting is also heavily used in the book. Extensive examples that you might find useful. To me, all scripting languages tend to blur into one. This particular language does not seem any tougher than the Korn or C shells.

Rating:
Summary: Too much walk-throw/screenshot based
Review: This book was defined as a reference and tutorial, but I have found it to bee too much screeshot based. As an analogy I could say this book has too many phrases similar to "click on the VIEW button to view the details". These things are redundant and I would have preferred to obtain deeper level details instead of high level.

This book is too much oriented on the admin console of Websphere, instead of detailing the whole variety of possible system configurations. I have sincerely found the freely available IBM Redbooks more useful.