J2ee Applications and Bea Weblogic Server

I like this book comparing with other J2EE books because:1. Reading other J2EE books is like learning driving in a parking lot. This book illustrates how to apply J2EE technology to a real Application Server.2. This is not a book written by a dozen people in a few months with over 1000 pages.3. Solid and important advises in the Best practice section for each chapter. Definite a big plus in designing a high traffic volume application.4. Concise and clear. Cover the most important J2EE technology.Room for improvement for next edition:1. Clean up some typo.2. Add local interface for EJB. (But most people should be able to pick this up in a 2-page long technical article.)3. Add Web Service if it can live up to its hype.This book will help you becoming a solid J2EE and Weblogic programmers. However, I should not raise too un-relalistic expection. A lot of hard work is still needed to become a J2EE guru.

I've been developing with Weblogic since back in the Tengah 3.1 days, and I wasn't sure how much I would get out of another J2EE book. However, I definitely learned a lot from this book.The best part about this book are the best practices sections in every chapter. I really found these to be valuable. I've been porting my application to Weblogic 6.1, and these really helped me out.I also liked the sections on performance tuning and capacity planning.

There are a lot of really good books out there dealing with J2EE technologies such as EJB, Servlets/JSP, JMS, etc.. (Like the O'Reilly books). But we didn't have a good book that put it all together in context of the WebLogic Application server, until now.I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this book. Michael Girdley and Rob Woollen are very smart people and people that spend any times in the WebLogic newsgroups know how smart these guys really are. I wasn't sure if that would translate to their writings -- It does. This is a very nicely written book that goes through Servlets, JSP, JDBC/JTA, JMS, RMI, EJB's including Message Beans and WebLogic specific configuration options including clustering and failover.I think this is a great book for beginners as well as advanced users as it is a reference and `step-by-step' tutorial rolled in one. One of my favorite things about the book is that each chapter is embedded with 'best practices' that contain a lot of useful gems, especially for more advanced users that just skim through the book. The final chapter of the book puts everything that you've learned from the previous chapters together into a complete J2EE application. The sample application, which is included on the CD is a Web-based auction system. A must-read for anyone that wants to learn everything they need about J2EE.

This book is very well done. In reading through, I'm most impressed by the co-mingling of J2EE with WebLogic. As a WebLogic developer, it is a must because of the Best Practices. Any one of these can save hours of trials and tribulations. While I have learned many of these through direct work with WebLogic, it would have been amazing to have them all in a single book when I first started, as is provided here. Invaluable.