Mastering Bea Weblogic Server: Best Practices for Building and Deploying J2ee Applications

I really like this book. It is not for beginners, and is not an "Intro to J2EE". However, for advanced developers, and especially those leaning towards the administation aspects of WebLogic Server, this book is an excellent resource. The examples in this book are straighforward, and the accompianing discussion is well written and easy to follow. A lot of discussions in this book cover advanced topics leaning towards deployment and administration (such as tuning JVMs, or understanding Thread usage), but there are some excellent discussions regarding architecture as well. There is not a lot of material discussing developing J2EE code. This book should be a part of any advanced J2EE developers library, especially those using WebLogic (since so many of the examples are targeted towards that platform).

Just to be up front, I know and have worked with the author so take my comments as you will.If you are using Weblogic to build enterprise-level software you need this book. The author tends to stay away from the newer and more gimmicky Weblogic features (workshop) and delivers the information you need to know - in an easy-to-read style. You'd be digging through BEA's on-line documentation for a long time trying to compile the information and experience that went into this book.In wouldn't give it five stars if I didn't think that it would be useful to every Weblogic developer/admin.BTW: One reviewer asked why xdoclet wasn't used in favor of ejbgen. While both are basically the same idea, ejbgen focuses only on Weblogic and provides much deeper support and is supported by Weblogic 8.1. Unless your code base needs to be deployed on multiple platforms, ejbgen is the way to go for Weblogic development

This is the best WebLogic book I have read till now. Author clearly states that this is not a beginners' reference, and I liked the book mainly because it is not; this book gets right into the meaty stuff without wasting pages and time on covering stuff that's splattered all over the internet in numerous free tutorials.This book covers WebLogic 8.1, touches upon features specific to WebLogic (not plain old J2EE stuff) and the coverage is pretty deep. For example, coverage of weblogic-tags taglib for JSP development, or the 'APP-INF' magic folder introduced in WL8.1 for application level libraries (oh, this was like a sore thumb in the previous WL releases and still is in J2EE spec) gives insight into advantages one gets using WebLogic over other J2EE platforms (much better than other books wasting pages and time on advantage of using 'a' J2EE platform).One of the features I loved about this book is the interspersed 'Best Practice' guides, you know reading a best practice guide by itself (like Floyd Marinesku's EJB Design Pattern) can sometimes get boring, here the best practices are put in perspective by discussing them in the right context, juxtaposing them with the problem these best practices address, along with code snippets and all, great job!The discussion on WebLogic clusters is the best I have seen till now and the config/architecture suggestions for development and production environments are very useful.

This is by far the best book on J2EE and Weblogic I have read. I like how the author explains every single step of a project (the bigrez.com project), from design to deployment, and justifying not only every choice he has made, but also taking time to explain other alternatives, why they don't fit for this project, and where they could be more useful. The Struts framework is widely discussed, and EJBGen has found a little place in the discussion.It's very nice also to avoid "J2EE for newbies" type of discussion, this book is really starting where many other books and references stop.

I read the book cover to cover and I must say this is by far the best WebLogic book I have read. It is very up-to-date (covers WLS 8.1), and it pulls all the WLS programming best practices that are scattered around a dozen or more newsgroups and web sites into a single volume. Unlike similar books that cover WLS in the context of J2EE alphabet soup, this book focuses on the following topics: web application, EJB, JMS, Security, Admin, Performance Tuning, Development and Deployment env setup, and Web Services, which represent >90% of your J2EE development needs. You will find practical info in every single chapter, and I found the discussion around entity beans, JMS, and JVM tuning exceptional. The "bigrez" sample is a miniature real world application, and the discussion on its design helps to tie the whole book together. For WebLogic beginners, don't look anywhere else - this book will get you started fast. Even for people like me who has a few WLS projects under the belt, you will come away with new information, and it also reinforces some of your hard-learned lessons.<p>Just a small complaints to conclude this review: I would move Chapter 13 on dev env best practices to Chapter 1, and reduce the amount of discussion on JSP. I also want to see some detailed examples on complex CMP relationships, as well as a separate and in-depth chapter on clustering that covers distributed JMS, MDB, and entity beans of various concurrency/caching startegies.