Reviews for JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide

1. Horribly out of date

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   Unfortunately, this book does not cover:
   
   JBoss 4.2 GA released 11 May 2007 (contains some important changes above 4.0)
   JBoss 5.0 GA released 5 Dec 2008
   JBoss 5.1 released 23 May 2009
   
   With JBoss 6 now due for release later this year (2010), this book has become largely obsolete and can only be recommended to those still running JBoss AS 4.0.

2. Not appropriate for current JBoss versions

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, May 12rd, 2009

   As good as this book may have been when published, it is now out of date.
   There is no coverage of EJB3: a massive omission for using "JBoss at work".
   
   The description on the amazon page states it covers JBoss 4. However, JBoss 4.2 handles EJB3 - a radically different way of coding and deploying EJBs.
   
   Only buy this if you are supporting J2EE 1.4 deployments and do not intend to move to EJB3.

3. Superb....

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2008

   Being new to JBOSS, this has book has taken me from novice to intermediate in developing with JBOSS. My recent contract could not have been completed without this book. The book itself follows an example from start to finish and shows how each component comes together under JBOSS server.

4. Proves useful way beyond JBoss

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2006

   I've had this book since it became available. I remember at the time being disappointed that it was less about JBoss and more about building a J2EE app using open source tools and techniques. However, I recently scanned my book shelf for something that might be able to help me refresh my memory on all the real, practical, aspects of enterprise Java and realised that this would do nicely.
   
   Marrs and Davis use the creation of an ecommerce web site for a car dealership to demonstrate all the key aspects of an enterprise Java application and its deployment in to a JBoss container. Using ANT and xDoclet it demonstrates how to avoid the XML configuration nightmare that can take the pleasure out of development. It simply introduces you to the configuration steps to make container managed resources, like databases, available to web applications via JNDI. It uses Hibernate to introduce Object Relational Mapping and progresses to demonstrate how common design patterns can be reflected using these technologies.
   
   The book is successful at condensing down the practicalities of Session Beans to just a few pages. Quite an achievement considering a lot of space is also dedicated to sensible reasoning about their use as well. If they are like me Marrs and Davis thought it was a waist of time elaborating any more as we are all waiting for EJB 3.0 anyway. I would recommend the section on JMS and MDB's. I was able to finally redesign a web application that had forced me in to managing my own threads for processing in bound messages over JMS some years ago (breaking the contract with a Tomcat container).
   
   The other sections worth a mention are the JavaMail and Web Services which maintain the same standard. This is basically a very useful book that should be on your desk, dog eared and scribbled on, but not as a reference for JBoss.

5. AVOID THIS BOOK

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, February 12st, 2006

   The supplied cd does not work on Windows 2000 or Windows XP. The support is non-existent, with e-mails ignored.

   The book is useless if you are unable to do the exercises in the book, so save your money and buy a different book.