Professional WebObjects 5.0 with Java

I bought this book to teach myself WO from the gound up. It has been extremely helpful and I highly recommend it if you're attempting to do the same. That being said, the book is quite difficult to learn from. This book teaches from fairly narrow examples and leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate the general concepts.

The very eager to have my own web site that helps me organize many lab chores made me buy WO software. I was shocked at nice interfaces of tools first, and more shocked at little tutorial resources of provider, Apple(though it is very often the case with this company, good product, poor documents/resources) . I've read through this book, which made me a near-intermediate WO programmer. (though becoming a wizard is another-actually learning curve for this framework-especially EOF-seems sigmoidal)Frankly, I think any book like this should be included in the sw package. Vendor should provide much reading/practicing material, I think. This book is well organized, and teaches much of the basic concept and coding/structuring techniques. But, as for me, a novice in this WO field, this book is somewhat hard to follow at first. So I've read whole documents the Apple provided, and then I could follow the way this book points out.Though making distinction is somewhat obscure, this book is for from 1/2 beginners to 3/4 intermediates. To make a long story short, this book won't disappoint you.

OK .. I haven't completed the book yet! But, I have skimmed it entirely. The is one of the best computer books that I have read! WebObjects is deep, there is a lot to it. To use WebObjects one cannot not simply skim documentation and then start to hack away on a project. I started with one of the other books which was good, but effort wasn't yeilding my desired results. After going throuh the work of reading, doing the excercises and digesting, I need to produce! I kept thinking, just go back to using servlets this ain't worth it. The other book wasn't exposing WebObjects well enough to get me psyched. The quality of this book and clarity that it is giving me, has kept me working through the chapters. It is well detailed and fun to read. The book's projects are very good, and worthwhile. I feel that when done, my work will have been justified. This is not just a 50 pound redo of readily available product documentation, like so many other books. Most nerds can't write, these guys do, and they did an excellent job.Next, I'd like to see a refernece manual.

I started coding WO almost 2 years ago now and I sure wish I had this book sitting on my shelf when I started! To be honest I have not read this book from cover to cover, but I did browse all the chapters and the earlier chapters would have turned on the light bulb a lot quicker for me when starting out.Having said that, this book is not limited to beginners. I have recently started the process of learning DirectToWeb and this book has already paid for itself with just the couple of D2W chapters there are. These chapters are especially important because D2W documentation is sorely lacking in the WO world.A must have for any WO developers shelf.

I've been using WebObjects for several years now (since pre-1.0 days) and this is a terrific addition to my reference material. The authors are well known WebObjects developers, and have an excellent grasp on the topic. The chapters on the DirectToWeb technology are worth the price of the book alone. Direct2Web allows you to provide substantial functionality without writing large amounts of code. This book has the only DirectToWeb tutorials that I'm aware of other than an article by Max Muller (one of the authors of this book) which was published on Stepwise.com.The DirectToJava coverage could have been more extensive (read that as more chapters... more coverage) but the one tutorial is certainly a good introduction of what is possible with that technology..Another strong point about this book is that it covers the released version of WebObjects 5.0 for Java, not a beta version... and both Mac OS X and Windows development environments are given equal space.