I would recommend this book to WLS users, provided that they are willing to buy the EJB3 book or to do some additional research on their own.
A number of my colleagues are WebLogic Server (WLS) developers and I wanted to review this book in order to 'keep in touch' with the technology.
This book is a companion to 'Enterprise JavaBeans, 3rd. Edition' (EJB3), also published by O'Reilly, which discusses how to create portable components that can move between application servers. It covers the implementation of EJBs under BEA's WebLogic Server 6.1, with updated examples for v7.0 being available from O'Reilly's web site. Other workbooks in the series cover IBM's WebSphere, JBoss and Sun's J2EE Reference Implementation.
The EJB3 book is not platform-specific and so particular installation environments need further documentation. The workbooks perform this function, each showing how its examples can be built to run on the different platforms.
The workbook is readable on its own, but for the maximum benefit needs to be read alongside the EJB3 book. I do not have a copy of the latter book, so I was not able to assess fully how well this book meets its objectives.
Despite the limitations of reading just this book it is possible to use it to download, install and try out the BEA examples under a 30-day free licence. This is a very useful idea as it gives the potential user of the WebLogic software enough time to try out the software in a real environment.
Some knowledge of XML, Java and JSP is really a pre-requisite for using the examples in this book, but if the reader doesn't have the EJB3 book enough information can be found using WWW searches and information from the BEA WWW site.
I would recommend this book to WLS users, provided that they are willing to buy the EJB3 book or to do some additional research on their own. Recommended with reservations.
