Professional IBM Websphere 5.0 Application Server

I found this book great. The examples were concise. The font was wonderful. Who knew J2EE could be so much fun?!?! (And those handsome dudes on the front sure don't hurt either.) 3 thumbs up

This may be a little premature as I'm only 100 pages in but, it's extremely refreshing to see a very thorough treatment of a J2EE focused product - that is rare to me. J2EE is not rocket science but, it is also not trivial as evidenced by the lack of good readable documention on the subject - despite J2EE ubiquity.The authors are obviously extremely knowledgable about their product (WS and WSAD) and they patiently communicate it in an articulate manner that make learning this stuff as easy as it could be.If you want something more concise and thoroughly difficult to learn from, go read the Sun J2EE specs, their fun... and their free and they mostly apply to WS.I've never liked a book written by 6 people. Usually the compliation reminds me more of a pile of ... e.g. just a hack. This book appears to be the exception. You really gain an appreciation and an understanding of the elegance of the functionality of the WS and WSAD products. I was a JDeveloper/9iAS bigot until this book and some experience with the WSAD/WS products.The only 2 problems I see with WAS 5.1 (that's the version I'm currently working with) is that it's a step behind the competition (i.e. J2EE 1.3 versus 1.4) and that some of the WSAD wizards are mediocre but, that's not the books problem.Thanks for the good job. Keep up the good work.

This book is very informative, but there are so many typos and, sometimes, wrong information. The code in enclosed CD is very sloppy.

This book provides the most comprehensive coverage of WebSphere 5.0 application server that you will find anywhere. Includes coverage of WebSphere Enterprise extensions.

This book covers an amazing amount of new material specific to deploying WAS 5 in an enterprise environment. The authors are all IBM All-stars who work with the WAS 5 product family on a daily basis and it shows. I have never found some of the information here, such as the details of Business Rules beans, Business Process management or Work Area Service anywhere else.My pet peve is the WROX production style - they cram so much into a book, I prefer Addison-Wesley's layout style better. That's the reason for only 4 stars. The book should have been two volumes. Chapter 12 on Deployment Topology and Workload management have several diagrams that are worth a lot. Appendix A gives great information on scripting the management tasks involved in running WAS 5. The commands are based on Jacl (Tcl like), and are used by many enterprise deployments. An absolutely overwhelming amount of material, including a 2 CD set with Websphere Studio App Developer Verison 5.