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Posts tagged book
Review of Oracle Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook (Packt Publishing) by Edwin Biemond, Guido Schmutz, Eric Elzinga et. al.
Feb 5th
Recently I gained access to an electronic copy of the just released Oracle Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook, written by five authors – all experts on OSB and three personal acquaintances of mine. I was very interested in learning about the final result after hearing many intermediate comments during the writing process as well as reading the occasional remark on Twitter. Knowing Guido, Eric and Edwin and assuming the same expert level for the other two authors, I anticipated a very interesting read.
Below I will share my impressions from browsing through this solid 500+ page volume. Note: the homepage for the book can be found here: http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-service-bus-11g-development-cookbook/book .
Book Review: Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook by Yannick Ongena
Nov 13th
A few months back, in August, I received an electronic copy of the book: “Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook” by Yannick Ongena (Packt Publishing, 2011). I promised you then you write a review on it and now I finally deliver on that promise.
Main conclusion: if you want to get started with WebCenter 11g, this book will help you take your first steps on many of the most important areas of Web Center (Portal). The recipes in the book provide clear instructions on getting things going. Where the Web Center documentation can be a little overwhelming – the Web Center Developer’s Guide has 69 chapters and presumably over 1500 pages of content – Yannick’s book is clear, straightforward and easy to follow.
I am not exactly sure about the intended reader for the book. The title and Yannick’s introduction mention Administration and a technical person responsible for administration. Many recipes however discusses topics and tasks I would associate with developers. So presumably both administrators and developers will benefit from the book. Note that the traditional roles of developer, administrator and end user are not as clearly defined with Web Center Portal: business or end users can take a lot of control over the portalat run time, potentially performing tasks traditionally associated only with developers. However, many run time activities are probably to complex for ordinary business users – so a technically skilled person who is typically active at run time in the run time environment is looked at to help out. In comes the administrator. Even though that may not be the usual Middleware Administrator turned DBA but more of a portal & content administrator. Well, that is for each organization itself to figure out. The persons responsible for creating the WebCenter portal, editing it at run time and taking care of its infrastructure and environment will all benefit from this book.
Book review of: Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1: A Hands-On Tutorial
Apr 18th
Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1: A Hands-On Tutorial
Authors: Demed L’Her, Heidi Buelow, Jayaram Kasi, Manas Deb, Prasen Palvankar (aka Oracle Product Management for SOA Suite)
A hands-on tutorial is what the cover of the book promises, and that is exactly what you get. A quick, very hands-on introduction into the most important components in the SOA Suite 11g. In no time at all, readers will be able to get a composite application up and running. An application that leverages many of the essential features and functions in the SOA Suite.
Some books are primarily an introduction into a certain topic, with lots of theory, background and explanations of what, why and how. Other books are mainly reference material that you use to look things up when you need them. This book is neither – it offers very little in the way of explanation and background and it would be fairly useless as reference guide. It is however a very good way to get to know the SOA Suite – both design time and run time – and get a feel for how to develop for it and run applications in it.
The book contains a large number of informative screenshots and also provides the salient code snippets. It is very focused on getting specific jobs done, and for these jobs it has all the information and illustrations you may need. It is hard to not get it to work following the very detailed instructions.
The book – or at least the paper copy I am holding – is written for the very first 11gR1 release, that was published on July 1st 2009. The functions made available with PS1 release (November 2009) are not discussed therefore.
Book Review: Processing XML Documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g by Deepak Vohra
Oct 3rd
A few months ago I came across a relatively new book: Processing XML Documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g by Deepak Vohra (370 pages, Packt Publishing, ISBN 978-1-847196-66-8, February 2009). 
It is an interesting mix of topics, all having to do with XML and most directly related to JDeveloper. The topcis and chapters do not at all times seem logically bundled together (for example design time and run time seem to be somewhat strangely intermingled in the book) but they provide a lot of useful information to any developer working on applications that involve XML in some way (and which one does not today) using JDeveloper as an IDE or Oracle XDK 11g..
And JDeveloper 11g’s XML capabilities may not be entirely on par with single issue IDEs such as XMLSpy, it certainly does a very good job at many frequent and less frequent XML tasks. This book does a good job at showing the various XML specific features of JDeveloper – although it also fails to mention one or two. It contains many examples of writing Java code to process XML in some way, primarily using XDK 11g; those examples are not always really specifically related to JDeveloper 11g, as the code uses standard libraries that can be used from any IDE. However, as examples of using XDK 11g for tasks like parsing, validating, transforming and querying (XPath) it is very valuable and will save developers a lot of googling.
The book’s cover states "Inspired by the author’s previous XML articles for the Oracle community, this expanded hands-on tutorial guides newcomers and intermediate users through JDeveloper 11g and XML document development. " Inspired seems putting it mildly: much of the book’s contents seems to consist of slightly refined versions of technical articles previously published on the Oracle Technology Network and other websites or books. Which is not certainly not necessarily a bad thing by the way. On the one hand it means that the chapters can be read in pretty much any order you like as they are fairly stand-alone. At the same time, the book does not have a clear overall thread or storyline except for a simple example – a simple and not very exciting Oracle Magazine article catalog document that makes appearances in most chapters.
