The Open Source Zone

I don' t recommend buying this book, since it is just a printout of the JBoss Guide freely available on JBoss site. Given the speed at which JBoss evolves you would soon find yourself with a stale documentation snapshot. Besides, the low quality of this documentation doesn' t really deserve a hard copy. I admire the JBoss team for their work and their intuition in supporting and adopting the most promising and advanced technologies, like Hibernate and AOP. Frankly, I don' t understand why they don't make the little effort of employing a few professional trainers to create top class documentation and tutorials. It would greatly push JBoss into the market as most potential JBoss adoptees are pushed back by the lack of way to become skilled and confident at using this server. It would not harm their certification revenues , given that to pass the exam you HAVE to take the class.
Anyways, this text as other as noted is an arid, barely coherent, messy agglomerate of dtds, schemas, example code and superficial explanations. Not deep enough for the wanna be JBoss developer and not clear and detailed enough for the JBoss programmer or administrator.
It is just the typical product you would expect when the project manager tells his average Joe programmer : "Hey I know this sucks but we need documentation for our framework in one week so try to put something together".
I really wish the JBoss team will understand soon that clear documentation and engaging tutorials are the heart of a successful project. Meanwhile, save your money for something else.

This is a good book. However, I believe that the prerequisites for this book include both an *expert* level understanding of J2EE (A strong awareness of Java EE 5 would be preferred) and a very high level of understanding of JBoss itself. Plus, you'd have to want to know a whole lot about how JBoss works and why. Most of the information in this book is not needed to successfully develop on, architect for, or administer JBoss. The two audiences who will benefit the most are those who wish to contribute to JBoss and those who seek JBoss professional certification.

Have you ever been to a technical presentation on a product where the speaker goes off on the inner-workings of their product without giving you any background or without explaining terms and concepts very well? Or, perhaps you've worked with or met a person who starts talking to you about something technical, assuming that you already know the context of everything they're talking about, but you're thinking "huh?". Well this is an entire book that is written in that style.

I bought this book because I have Norman Richards' "JBoss: A Developer Notebook" and I loved it. Though I realized the format of this book was different, I expected the quality to be as good. I was very wrong. This book is very esoteric and would have received a bit fat "F", had my technical writing professor from college graded it.

My first gripe is that if you flip through the book, it seems like most of the book consists of snapshots, code, DTDs, and schemas. They could have done a much better job selecting relevant information. Thus, the book is very bloated with content that is very impractical. I think a previous reviewer already hit on this point.

My second gripe is that the book seems to be written for somebody who is (or wants to be) a contributor to the JBoss project. Most people would buy a book on JBoss to learn how to deploy / configure applications or to read about practical design decisions. The book focuses heavily on the internal workings and design decisions of JBoss. Don't get me wrong, I think that JBoss has a great architecture, but I wouldn't expect the second chapter of the book to be about the JMX microkernel architecture.

My third gripe is that they don't give you background on many things. They just start talking about some JBoss component or class without explaining the fundamental concepts to you in layman's terms.

My fourth gripe is that the book lacks decent structure; it parades back and forth between topics. For example, in the second chapter, they start talking about MBeans, then they diverge and go into a very deep (and very hard to follow) discussion about the classloader architecture. Then, they come back to talking about XMBeans. Why didn't they just talking about all the different types of MBeans in order? If I wanted to reference this book, it would be a nightmare.

Some parts are slightly better than others, but the lesser of two evils is still evil. Overall I'm very disappointed and would not recommend spending your money on this book.

Given the authors one would expect the book to be good. The text is okay but when you try to run the examples as you read you run into numerous problems. Some examples don't compile on Linux (but work well on Windows), others compile but don't run. Everytime I had a problem on Linux I'd shift to XP and life would be orders better.

Some chapters are very well written. I like the one on JMX the best. Some are not so well written (Messaging).

I picked up this book to flush out a particular topic. I found most of the text in the book on that topic to be identical to the free texts available through the jBoss site. It's a good desk reference, but I do not think it offers more than what can be found in the free documentation and maybe a few minutes spent on a search engine.