The Open Source Zone

This a good book if you don't know anyting about JBoss, but it falls short once you detailed information. Check the JBoss forums for answers before buying this book.

The subtitle of this book "Administration and Development" is comletely inaccurate. The foreward begins: "This book is for the JBoss content developer and administrator".<p>No it isn't. It should be called "JBoss Internals", which is what it actually covers. Whoever chose the title was an idiot. How anyone could imagine that a book on JBoss that doesn't cover EJB deployment is aimed at administrators is beyond me.<p>Less than useless (if I could give it zero stars I would), as the "authorized" book, it will actively discourage people from learning JBoss.

This book is a mess. It is rife with typos and confusing grammatical errors. Diagrams are cut off and/or poorly laid out.<p>This would be forgivable if the overall content hit the spot. However, as another reviewer noted, the main focus is on the internals of JBoss, not on how to use it. Ultimately, that's the biggest disappointment.

Good book if you already know JBoss. If you're thinking of re-writing JBoss or just wondering how it works internally then this is good. Absolutely needs step-by-step guide on how to install a bean. Even the JBoss doc.s on the CD are very weak. Having used WebLogic and WebSphere extensively I have still spent 4 hours and not gotten a bean to deploy AFAICT. Oh yeah, no clients/usage are given for the examples; e.g. they show on p70 code and talk about the J2eeDeployer service as being a web service but give no example code or mention of how to use it! Oh yeah, p14 says to drop jar's in the deploy directory and they will be deployed automatically. Well, where are they? Where are the usage examples for the examples provided?

The chapter on security might as well be encrypted. The authors constantly use terms before they are defined. They rarely give a comprehensible overview of subjects, they just jump in and bury you with details. These are some very smart guys who don't know how to write a text book.