Websphere Starter Kit

Last week I finally got a chance to start reading the book, on a very long flight to Asia. Great Stuff! The book is very readable, and is true to the title by focusing on being a starter-kit. This book is an excellent way to get going with Websphere. I was a bit put off by all the flak this book got on the various postings here, but hey - did these guys not notice the "Starter" word on the book cover?Having a bit of experience with servlets and JSPs using Apahce/Tomcat I was eager to plunge into all of these as well as EJB. The book is certainly a good way to do all that, although a separate EJB book could come in handy. My only important reservation is that a new edition MUST be published to update this to WebSphere 3.5 or at least 3.0.

The book is good but you should understand what it is for. It's exactly WebSphere Starter Kit as it called in the title. It gives your overview of numerous WebSphere components and you start to understand what they are and what to read next. But it's not a tutorial. It contains some code samples, but it's just illustration what can be done. It's like if you visit space museum you can learn what is space rocket, but you don't know how to build it. It's also not a complete reference of WebSphere components and possible architectures. It's exactly the Starter Kit. CD also helps you to get started quicker. WebSphere is growing so fast in many directions that it doesn't look like stable environment yet. And this book just reflects this situation. Authors give you good explanation of core techniques and they also try to focus on the most important and promising new components, but sometimes it's not obvious.And, finally, IBM likes very sophisticated and complicated solutions (just compare Token Ring and Ethernet, IBM old OSes and Unix, SNA and TCP/IP). WebSphere is a complete and scalable solution, it works and you can really use it for e-business, but it isn't easy reading. Be ready to study a lot!

This book is helpful in two things - it is both broad in terms of providing a complete overview of the WebSphere family of products (including load balancing, Tivoli integration, and the tools) but also gives a lot of details on the important stuff like EJBs, servlets, JSPs, and XML. I recommend it both for people working with WebSphere as well as people who are evaluating WebSphere. I don't think it is very appropriate for WebSphere experts.

The company I work for decided to use IBM products for setting up our web-sites.Without having any serious training with Servlets/JSP I managed to install WebSphere from the attached CD, connect it to previously installed Oracle DB, and develop a running application based on the provided examples.The book provides a lot of background and explanations about other IBM products, that might be either helpful or not. For most people that would seem redundant, but I think it is useful to have this material as reference.