Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing, 21 Nov 2007
I purchased this on the basis of the promise made on its front cover: "The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish". Firstly, this is as far from "complete" as I have ever come across.
As you no doubt know, GlassFish V2 is a highly sophisticated JEE app server. I have been using it for over a year but the impact and/or appropriateness of many of its "deeper" configuration settings were unknown to me. I hoped this book would answer my questions.
For instance, there are about 100 parameter settings for connection pools (which manage connections to a database). Excluding the screen shots of the web-based GUI, connection pools are covered in about twenty lines of text. Most of which are lines introducing the pictures. In fact, apart from the glib statement about accepting the defaults, there is nothing about how to choose the parameters governing connection pools. Or even how they work. A quick check in the Index reveals no mention of connection pools! There's no mention of JNDI in the index either!
OK so what about domain configuration files? Nothing. Templates? Nope.
So what does it cover? Well, it's a farily slim volume anyway but it covers the suite of web-tier and data-tier environments (Servlets, JSP, EJBs, even JDBC, and security) but in an incredibly shallow way. This might suite an out and out novice, but if you're a seasoned web programmer this book will not deliver!
This book is for novices at best. It is in no way a "complete guide to GlassFish". One to be avoided.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
This book has little to do with GlassFish, 6 Mar 2008
The subtitle of this book ("The complete guide to installing and configuring GlassFish...") is at best ambiguous and at worst outright misleading. One has to read the synopsis in detail to find out what this book really covers. This book is NOT about configuring GlassFish in any level of detail.
I bought this book to get up to speed on GlassFish, and to be quite honest the only thing it was good for was how to download it and perform the initial installation, and this I could have easily gotten from Sun's website as well.
This book mostly covers EE5 technologies (and that not in great detail either), with the occasional mention of how they fit-in with GlassFish. If you want to learn about EE5...get a different book...if you want to learn about GlassFish...get your infos from the web.
One thing that really annoyed me were the over-dimensioned (and sometimes repeated!) screenshots; not to mention the frequent irrelevant code snippets (e.g. half a page of catch() statements that add nothing to the example). In places the english was bad, and the layout is terrible (have the people at Packt Publishing never read a Manning or O'Reilly book to see what a good layout for a technical book looks like?).
In short, I cannot see any reason why anybody would buy this book, and I definitely think I didn't get value-for-money here.
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