The Pragmatic Craftsman
:: Simplicity from complexity : by Stanley Kubasek ::
The Pragmatic Craftsman
:: Simplicity from complexity : by Stanley Kubasek ::
Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3
by Antonio Goncalves
ISBN 1430219548
Date Read 12/2009
My Rating
If you’ve been following the Java EE world, you know that Java EE 6 along with Glassfish v3 application server were released recently. This book has been around since mid year! And it’s still the only book on the subject. To me this was a great gift: I was able to get a complete sneak peek at the new technologies to be released ahead of time.
But was it worth it?
Great overview. If you want to learn what the buzz in the Java Enterprise (EE) world is all about, this is a great book to read. The author does a great job in keeping things at a fairly high level. He focuses on giving you just enough details (but not more), so you can actually start playing around with the technology. That makes this book easy to read. And practical — pragmatic!
Covers the important EE technologies. JPA. JSF. EJB. JMS. Web Services (SOAP and REST). JPA is covered really well. Four chapters dedicated to that. Four chapters for EJBs as well. And three for JSF. Two for each of the web services specs (one for SOAP and one for REST). The coverage on these should be enough to get you started and start playing around. The other technologies are covered very briefly.
Quick read. Not too deep. Not too shallow. This is the author’s style. It’s easy to read. The author gives you a lot of examples in between. On the other hand, at times, it would be nice to have a deeper treatment of a given technology.
Lots of examples. I love to see that. But not every chapter is treated the same. Some chapters have a complete example (Putting It All Together), and some don’t. I was able to run the examples from some chapters but not from all. I had to modify several to make it work. I wish a greater care was put in this area. It’s frustrating when you try to run something and you can’t. But if you’re willing to research it by yourself, you will learn more! I guess that’s the upside. But it does slow you down a bit.
Some technologies are not covered. CDI, is not there. Very light treatment of bean validation.
Overall, an excellent overview of Java EE 6, but not a complete guide/reference on the subject. I was very happy to see this book. And I’m very happy that I had read it. From what I see (at least on Amazon), a second edition will come out in a few months — might want to wait for that. Overall, a very good book on Java EE. Recommended.
Thanks for the review. I didn’t want to cover CDI and Servlet because at the time of writing these 2 specifications were going through a big rewrite. Same for Bean Validation that was “officially” introduced in EE 6 a bit too late.
If you think parts should be more (or less) explained, or if you have trouble with the code, you can use the forum to get some feedbaxc.
http://getsatisfaction.com/javaee6/products/javaee6_java_ee_6
Antonio
Great to speak to the author directly!
Great job on the book!
One of the attractions of this book is that it is relatively small. You can’t keep everyone happy.
Are you planning to cover CDI/Beans/Servlets in the 2nd edition?
Actually, what will be different in the 2nd edition and when is it coming out?
Thanks!-Stanley
As you say, it’s difficult to keep everyone happy. My idea for this book was to summarize the 8000 pages of the entire EE 6 specs into a relatively small and understandable book. As you say, not too much, not too litlle.
Well, I can’t give you all the details of my secret weapon for the second edition ;o) I’ll primarily update the book. Some changes have been made to some specifications, so I need to be more accurate. I’ll definitely cover Servlet 3.0 and Bean Validation. Not sure about CDI because it would need an entire architecture section… I don’t know, maybe just cover the basis of dependency injection.