13325730
submission
RickJWagner writes:
This book takes an interesting path to teaching Plone 3 development. Unlike most software instructional books, it starts way back in the often-unread Preface by listing 10 requirements a mythical customer is asking the reader to implement in Plone 3. The requirements are realistic and I think would probably be quite a stretch for an inexperienced Plone developer. The rest of the book is dedicated to implementing those 10 features, and coaching the reader on Plone 3 development along the way.
I wouldn't say this is a good book for a novice Plone user. There really isn't much introductory material, and there is little material to transition the reader from Plone installation to meaty development. A newbie could certainly use this book if it were augmented with additional material (say, the Internet and a fair amount of time allocate), but the reader had better be ready to self-educate on Plone/Zope/Python development if they are not already proficient in these areas. For developers who already know their way around Plone, however, this book is an excellent step-by-step guide to adding serious functionality to the platform.
The book follows a consistent theme throughout. The desired functionality is briefly (very briefly) described, then the reader is given the following sections: Getting Ready, How to Do It, How it Works, and (sometimes) There's More. Here's how these work:
Getting Ready — outlines installation prerequisites, the things you'll need to gather.
How to Do It — step by step instructions on how to implement your changes.
How It Works — after you've configured things in the previous step, this step explains why things work.
There's More — an optional section where further reading can be found, or maybe extras like test procedures.
The book includes more than just the 10 specified features from the Preface, though. The authors cover development best practices, documentation, a section on testing, and many other goodies that are not directly in the path of implementing those 10 requirements. I especially liked the parts about performance improvements, a consideration that's sometimes lacking in development books.
The book definately reads differently than most tech instructional books-- it's more like an expert's working notes than it is a typical dev book. It took me a few chapters to catch on, but after I figured out how to best use this format I can see how this would be very useful for random-access reference work. You don't need to do everything in sequence, just skip right to where you need to go.
If you're charged with doing Plone 3 development, I'd recommend this book. There's a lot of expert advice here, and it covers a wide range of development activities. I would imagine almost every developer will learn some things from this book, and many developers will learn a great deal. For producing Plone 3 products, it will provide a quick answer for many commonly encountered questions.
The book can be found here: https://www.packtpub.com/plone-3-3-products-development-cookbook/book
12579656
submission
RickJWagner writes:
CodeIgniter is a multi-purpose, open source PHP web application framework that can dramatically reduce the amount of coding required in developing a full-featured web site. This book promises to introduce the reader to the most productive APIs and demonstrate their usage with minimal code snippets. In that regard, I think the book lives up to it's promise.
The first chapter covers CodeIgniter's MVC framework, which provides a way for a programmer to logically partition code so it's easier to maintain. For those of us who aren't accomplished PHP coders, this chapter also contains a PHP style guide, which I thought was a nice feature. By the way, the code snippets throughout the book are clean and easy to read-- the author must have followed his own advice on code style.
The second chapter is an introduction to some of the more productive libraries you'll find in CodeIgniter. Here you'll find some excellent advice on how to take timing metrics in your application, how to secure it, and how to accomplish routine activities like retreiving data from the user's request. Other 'web topics' are addressed here, like how to manipulate the session, how to manage emails and file uploads, and much more.
Chapter 3 handles form inputs and databases. As is common throughout the book, the reader is given minimal technical overview. What you'll find instead is a very brief explanation of what's about to be covered, then a few very readable source lines that demonstrate use of CodeIgniter in action. If this book were your only resource, I'm sure there would be times where you didn't find enough material to get everything done you wanted to do. But if you have a web browser (and Google) handy, a book of this type can be an effective index to help you find the parts of a framework you want to leverage.
The next few chapters cover user authentication and application security. I found these to be a little spotty-- heavy in some places, light in others. Still, the material was useful and not difficult to read or understand.
A nice chapter on tips for building a large-scale application was next. I found this one interesting-- many of the ideas were well-known, but a few had not occurred to me before. I liked reading it. Next up was a chapter on Web Services. I didn't take the time to test the provided code for this chapter, but I would like to sometime. If it works as I hope it will, I may have a new way to stand-up test web services!
The final 2 chapters are on extending CodeIgniter (it's great that the library authors institutionalized this!) and donating code back to the community.
So who is this book for? The book itself tells you it's for expert PHP coders, but I don't believe that's exactly right. Given the easy-to-read nature of the book and the light treatment given to some of the meatier topics, I'd say this book is about right for a novice-to-intermediate level PHP coder. I haven't done a lot in PHP, yet I found the code reading very easy.
If I had a wish for the book, I'd wish for a little more depth in the harder topics and maybe some quick overviews for a few topics. (Diagrams accompanying the overviews would be nice, too. This book has few illustrations except for screen-shots.)
All things considered, I'd recommend this book to coders that are getting started with PHP and CodeIgniter. It's easy to read and will get the reader pointed in the right direction for solving many web problems.
The book (and a sample chapter) can be found here: https://www.packtpub.com/codeigniter-1-7-professional-development/book
11339120
submission
RickJWagner writes:
Book Review: OpenX Ad Server Beginner's Guide
This book outlines use of the OpenX Ad Server. This open source software is used by bloggers, website hosts, and marketeers to set up and execute advertising campaigns. It lets the user define which banners should be shown on which web sites, how often, for which advertisers, and for how long. It also tracks results for the campaign so you can fine-tune your results as the user clicks occur.
The book promises to teach an absolute novice how to use OpenX. In that regard, I find the book kept the promise it made. The reader is given clear instructions on how to download OpenX and apply it to their environment. Even the mechanisms used to FTP files around are given clear text and step-by-step screen shots. Once the software is installed and in use, the same kind of detailed instructions guide the user through every task needed to effectively set up and execute marketing campaigns.
For those new to online advertising, the book provides clear explanations of the underlying concepts. Advertisers, Campaigns, Banners, and Zones are all spelled out clearly in text and with accompanying diagrams. The diagrams, by the way, are clear and easy to understand. This is all necessary prep work, as the reader is then treated to chapter by chapter deep dives on working with each of these fundamental building blocks. The chapters instruct the reader on the necessary details and options associated with each of these constructs. Once the reader recognizes the patterns used by the books authors, one chapter after the other spells out how to configure and make best use of the options provided by OpenX.
The first chapters are devoted to the high-level basics, the middle chapters to implementing those high-level components, and the final chapters to administrative issues and gathering statistics for your advertising campaigns. I found this layout to be logical, as it gives the user the big picture first, followed by the exciting middle topics, and lastly the parts you need to really maintain the product.
After reading this book, you will be able to:
- Understand online marketing and the terms associated with it
- Install the OpenX ad server
- Manage relationships between advertisers and publishers, campaigns and websites, users and campaigns
- Use the OpenX server to place advertisements in specific areas of webpages, and determine which ads will show in which frequencies
- Generate statistics on your advertisements, so you can understand and refine effectiveness
- Upgrade OpenX
- Use 'GeoTargeting' to direct users to appropriate ads by geography
- Use 'Channels' to direct ads by type to web site areas that fit the topic
- Manage your users and administrators (including allowing users to affect the content of their own campaigns)
All things considered, I found OpenX to be a very capable platform for serving online advertisements and I found this book is an excellent introduction to both online advertising and the OpenX server. If you have an interest in online advertisement, I would recommend you have a look at this title.
The book can be found here: https://www.packtpub.com/openx-ad-server-beginners-guide/book
About the author: Rick Wagner is an Enterprise Architect and developer working in the customer demographics workspace. Rick is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect and member of the International Association of Software Architects.
9237198
submission
RickJWagner writes:
Book Review of "JBoss AS 5 Development" by Packt Publishing
I've just finished a review of the latest JBoss book by Packt Publishing. I wouldn't call it a development book, but wouldn't call it an administrative book, either-- it's really a little of both.
The book promises to cover a lot of territory, and it keeps it's promise. The 14 chapters, in a nutshell contain the following:
- Installation of the application server and Eclipse-based IDE toolkit
- Major differences between JBoss AS 5 and previous versions
- Customizing your JBoss installation
- Developing EJB 3 Session beans
- Working with JPA
- Writing a web application (JSF)
- The new JBoss messaging subsystem (JMS)
- Writing Hibernate applications on JBoss
- JMX and MBeans
- JBoss Web Services
- Clustering JBoss servers
- Writing Clustered Applications
- JBoss AS Security
- Securing applications under JBoss
Notice the last 4 chapters-- Intro to Clustering, then Writing Clustered Applications. Intro to JBoss Security, then Securing Applications. This will give you a hint about the depth the book provides-- it gives a reasonable overview, followed by a deep-dive into content a technician will find usable. I thought the book did a good job of presenting high-level content, yet providing the detail a code-slinger requires. Kudos to the author for that.
The book is reasonably illustrated. There are plenty of high-level illustrations (and some are needed, for the more abstract topics). The book also provides plenty of screen shots, mostly featuring JBoss Tools. More on that later, but for now let's say I was only moderately impressed with the performance of that set of tools.
As a developer/architect, I found the depth of the book somewhere on the middle-to-high-end. I don't think it's a good book for complete newbies-- rather, I'd suggest this book for devs that are already somewhat confident in their JEE coding abilities. You may be wondering why I'd say such a thing-- mostly it's because JBoss tools are just not in the same league as NetBeans 6.8 at this point. If you're a complete newbie to Enterprise Java, I'd suggest you first pick up a copy of NetBeans and GlassFish, then learn the ropes with this easy-to-use combo. Later, once it's all old hat you can pick up JBoss Tools.
This in no way diminishes the value this book will hold for a user of JBoss AS 5. There are plenty of expert level tips for performance, security, customizations, etc. There are also coding tips any developer will appreciate, hence my earlier assertion that this book straddles the developer/administrator line. If you're a JBoss user, you'll find some good stuff here, no doubt about it.
The book is written in an easy to read manner. If you're not an expert on the whole JEE stack, don't worry-- all the major components are given gentle introductory chapters that coach you through writing a JSF application, an EJB, a JPA application and a Hibernate one, etc. If you're lucky, the tools will behave as they're supposed to and you'll quickly have a reference application you can use to model your real-world needs. (If you're not lucky, you'll get some good practice at problem analysis and application debugging. Let's be real, that practice is going to come in handy if you truly are going to use JBoss in production. This is how experts are made....)
There's a lot of content here for a technical book. (There are surely smaller books. But then again, JBoss 5 brought some significant changes, so a big book is warranted.) Comparing this title to the old 'official' JBoss 4 AS doc I have a copy of, I'd praise this book for not filling pages with stuff I don't need to know. It also offers some candid quick-n-dirty tips in places that will give the developer some quick insites into the platform that can quickly be leveraged. Nice.
The author deserves a little praise for decent readability. Truth be told, those folks on the cutting edge of technology are not always the greatest communicators, written or otherwise. This guy makes everything flow well, though, so I give the book good marks in this regard.
All things considered, I'd recommend this book to the following audiences:
- Anyone planning to use JBoss AS 5 in production (Developer or Administrator)
- Intermediate to Advanced level Enterprise Java coders
- Architects in need of high-level descriptions of the latest JEE components
Audience I would *not* recommend this book for:
- Developers not yet proficient in Enterprise Java coding. You might work your way through the book, but you might spend a little time gathering valuable debugging experience on the way.
Happy Reading, and Happy Coding!
Author biography
Rick Wagner is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, Sun Certified Java Programmer, and member of the International Association of Software Architects. Rick lives in Arkansas with his wife and 3 kids. You can read his blog at www.rickwagner.blogspot.com"
9167022
submission
RickJWagner writes:
Book Review for "JBoss AS 5 Development" by Packt Publishing
This review is for "JBoss AS 5 Development", which has the subtitle "Develop, deploy, and secure Java applications on this robust open source application server". Having gone through the book with IDE in hand, I would have to say I find the subtitle more indicative of the content than the first part of the title. Later I'll try to explain why I feel so.
The book promises to cover a great amount of territory. Roughly, the 14 chapters cover these topics:
- Installation of the application server and Eclipse-based IDE toolkit
- Major differences between JBoss AS 5 and previous versions
- Customizing your JBoss installation
- Developing EJB 3 Session beans
- Working with JPA
- Writing a web application (JSF)
- The new JBoss messaging subsystem (JMS)
- Writing Hibernate applications on JBoss
- JMX and MBeans
- JBoss Web Services
- Clustering JBoss servers
- Writing Clustered Applications
- JBoss AS Security
- Securing applications under JBoss
If that seems like quite a list to digest, I would agree. The last 4 chapters give a hint to the depth of content the reader will encounter. In those cases, the author first presents an overview chapter about how the application server handles the topic (clustering, security), then follows it up with a whole chapter about applying the implementation details. I thought this struck the right balance between being too high-level (as many books might be) versus being overly detailed (as the old JBoss 4 AS doc book could be in places.)
I think this book will be an excellent acquisition for anyone who is certain they will be working with JBoss AS 5. The author has a deep understanding of the application server and writes in an easy to understand style. The book covers a great amount of 'real world' territory that is sure to be of interest for anyone tasked with moving an application to production under JBoss AS 5. Subjects like security and clustering (must-haves in a production environment) are given enough coverage that they can be of immediate practical use. (Note: these topics are not of vital importance in a pure development effort. A great amount of development can be done without paying attention to either security or clustering.) This is one reason I consider this book to be an interesting blend of development material and administrative material-- it is clearly not a pure development book.
For those that are interested in learning JEE but are not certain they'll be using JBoss, I'd suggest they should consider this book but also compare it to other titles, perhaps one of Packt's excellent NetBeans/GlassFish titles. This is not the fault of the book-- the author does a good job of walking the reader through various exercises in building EJBs, a JSF front-end application, a web service application, etc. The reason I don't suggest this book for new students of JEE is that the raw toolkit is just not at the same level some other open source development stacks are at. (Notably, NetBeans 6.8 and GlassFish). Putting it plainly, there are more than a few things that can go wrong in putting together a JEE application with JBoss Tools-- if the user isn't seasoned in problem analysis and debugging, it could easily lead to frustrations and an unsatisfactory experience.
If you're already confident in your ability to write and deploy JEE apps, you should find this book to your liking. Intermediate to advanced JEE developers ought to find plenty of material to keep them interested. Performance tips, JBoss specific extensions, and expert usage tips for enterprise Java development all get good coverage. The author knows the ins and outs of using JBoss AS 5, and is generous in providing tips in effective usage of facets the reader is likely to encounter. The author also provides good high-level overview material (which usually precedes the detail), which helps keep the reader grounded in the larger context of what's being conveyed.
The book provides a reasonable number of illustrations, including screen shots of JBoss Tools wizard screens. I found these of reasonable value, but have to admit I'm of mixed emotions on the toolset itself. It does a great job of some things (I love the packaging wizard that let's you declaratively roll up .jars, .ears, etc.). On the negative side, it makes some actions much more difficult than they have to be. I thought the author did a good job of providing meaningful illustrations where an abstract idea was being presented, especially in the security and clustering chapters. I once made a presentation at JBoss World about studying for the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam using JBoss-- I wish I'd had those illustrations then! I guess my SCEA is now a depreciated asset-- maybe we'll have to study for 'Oracle' architectural credentials in the future.
All things considered, this book will be an excellent source of information and reference for anyone using JBoss AS 5. I'm sure it will prove value time and again as the reader delves into the various corners of enterprise Java. This book offers expert insites on many topics and does it in an easy to read manner.
Author biography
Rick Wagner is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, Sun Certified Java Programmer, and member of the International Association of Software Architects. Rick lives in Arkansas with his wife and 3 kids. You can read his blog at www.rickwagner.blogspot.com
8652864
submission
RickJWagner writes:
"GlassFish Administration" is a handbook for administrators, developers, and users of the GlassFish application server. Since GlassFish is the reference implementation for the Java EE stack, it stands to reason that an astute reader of this book will be exposed to all the slick features of JEE. (I found this to be true, by the way.) Since I've long been a fan of Sun's ability to make tools that are easy to use (at least as far as JEE allows), I dove into this title expecting to find new and easy ways to leverage the Enterprise Java stack. I wasn't disappointed.
This book promises to cover GlassFish from the point of view of the administrator. This has actually been an overlooked niche, I think-- there are many books to assist the JEE developer, but few are written exactly to help you when your role involves the care and feed for the running server. In addition to administrator-types, I'd also highly recommend this book to Enterprise Java Developers. A copy of this book, coupled with the excellent NetBeans IDE will give the user a powerful and easy to use toolkit for understanding the intricacies of JEE.
The table of contents promises the following:
- Basic GlassFish architecture
- Application deployment
- The usual administrative activities around connection pools, databases, and JMS queues
- Security (a must-have)
- Monitoring (Hey, that's good!)
- Clusters and High Availability
- Tuning and TroubleShooting (Tuning is another really good thing to see!)
The book delivers on what the Table of Contents promised, and does it in a very readable way.
I was especially pleased with the generous use of illustrations. The author made good use of diagrams to help the reader understand abstract ideas, as well as showing screenshots to help guide the reader through the GlassFish UI. As an unexpected bonus, almost every UI action was accompanied by the command line equivalent. (Very useful for those admins who like to script actions for repeatability and auditing purposes.) If you're like me, you probably don't mind using a graphical UI the first few times you do something, but the CLI is much faster once you know exactly what you're doing. For that reason, I'm really glad the CLI was given enough coverage.
The text was easy to read and packed with useful real-world advice on best practices for owners of a JEE Application Server. (Note that much of the advice given was not particular to GlassFish-- there are quite a few best practices here that can be applied to other App Servers as well.) I was especially appreciative of the sections on performance tuning and server monitoring, two areas that don't usually receive a lot of attention. Here are some particular likes and dislikes I had with this book:
Like
- Easy to read
- Lots of expert tips on app server usage
- Decent coverage of application development matters, could be used as a refresher for those of us who aren't JEE current
- Advice on tuning and monitoring always holds great value to 'real world' users
Dislike
- Covers GlassFish v2 extensively, but v3 is only covered by one chapter (in fairness to the book, version 3 is brand-spanking new and version 2 is the current production mainstay)
- I wish it contained a little more content on GlassFish development with Netbeans, as 'Beans and 'Fish are a dynamite combination (sorry, I couldn't resist. The two do go really good together, though.)
Conclusion:
I'd recommend this book for anyone who uses GlassFish, and anyone who needs an easy way to work with JEE. It's a really easy read.
About the author:
Rick Wagner is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect and avid software developer. You can read Rick's blog at www.rickwagner.blogspot.com
