The Open Source Zone

First of all, I had high hopes for this book, based on other comments. I can only imagine comments were done by inexperienced people who didn't know too much about actual details regarding low-level details, or didn't mind factual errors, preaching style and skimming of actual useful pieces (beyond simple code examples one can easily get from Sun's JMS tutorial page).

At first book seemed ok; first few chapters had proper introduction to JMS, at surface level. Too bad it never really got beyond the surface: usually author just listed things at high level ("you can do this and that for security") without even trying to get into concrete facts. Worse, when he did, much of the time "facts" were just plain wrong. Comments on UDP, for example, were utter gibberish, as anyone who has basic knowledge of IP networking protocols knows (even the acronym given was wrong). And this continued throughout the book.

Writing style was also too preachy for me: most of "naturally"s and "obviously"s could (and should) have been left out; especially as often it's debatable if the statement following was even true. Check "performance tuning" tips for a good example on misguided tips that most experienced java developers nowadays would consider obsolete (for example, suggestions on aggressive object pooling and reusing, using final keyword).

The final problem that I saw was that there were also a few typos (and/or cut'n paste errors): for example, in message definitions descriptions for fields were clearly cut'n pasted, as the stock quote message descriptions wouldn't otherwise make any sense.

The reason for two stars is due to the fact that the code samples were usually ok still, and there were some useful tidbits from related subjects (like JCE samples).

I have used JMS for about 2.5 years before I bought this book.
There wasn't many books writing about JMS the first time I used JMS back in 2000.
This book has a solid coverage of JMS and give you advice in designing an enterprise application using JMS.
You can find samples of administration tasks for JMS Product from BEA Weblogic and iPlanet Message Queue.
The only thing that I missed is the coverage of IBM MQ, which is the messaging infrastructure that I use.<p>If you want to get a good understanding on designing JMS application, don't look further, buy this book, you won't regret your investment

I bought this as I needed a JMS reference that went beyond the spec and talked about design, deployment and management of JMS infrastructure. I was very impressed with everything I read until I dipped into Chapter 13 - specifically the four pages on improving client-side throughput through internal queueing. While this is an excellent idea, the example shows how to build a complicated and threading-heavy internal queue and dispatching mechanism and recommends that you use it to, er, put events onto the Swing event dispatcher's internal queue. Hmm.<p>The book (commendably) sets out to give a full picture of how to design, build, deploy, secure, and manage a JMS-based messaging architecture. This means, however, that it's very noticeable when a topic is skimmed over. For example, the section on bridging two different vendors' JMS implementations has two pages of simple code and less than one page of discussion that fails to consider administration, security, or performance, despite the normally good coverage of these areas elsewhere. <p>Nevertheless, I was mostly impressed with this book - it's just a pity that the high standards it sets itself aren't met consistently throughout the book. A second edition that discussed the example architectures in Part III in detail would be a truly excellent book, and would be relevant to all messaging products rather than just JMS.

This book gave me real world examples, concepts and gotchas related to JMS. I found it very useful for understanding how to implement JMS with my J2EE application. It explained JMS in a fluid style that was easy to read.<p>This book goes beyond theory and explains how to use JMS in different situations.

Excellent book covering so many practical issues for JMS systems. The architectural insights were certainly useful for someone new to JMS.<p>The only complaint I have is the title - this books covers so much more than just Programming issues!<p>Well done Shaun.