Thinking about a subscription. Is it worth it?

[desole]

Since I need some good documentation about JBoss, I'm thinking about subscribing to the JBoss documentation. The question is if I should consider a subscription instead of buying some books.
The site says:

"Instead of buying the books individually, we recommend this advantageous and convenient subscription model".

So should I think that the documentation is more or less the same as the books, and maybe the only difference is that I can get it a bit faster?

[meatus]

I think I read that 4.0 documentation and beyond will be free; a shift in the JBoss business model? Has anyone else heard that the 4.0 docs will be free?

In any case, I wouldn't recommend getting the subscription to begin with. From what I've seen so far (about 4 months of development with the JBoss Application Server), about 90% of your questions will be answered in J2EE documentation or tutorials that you can get for free on Sun's website. Another couple of percentage points will be covered by the JNDI documentation and tutorial. JBoss docs, and most books for that matter, seem to cover the more powerful features exclusive to JBoss. The odds are that you won't approach that pitch until you're pretty far down the road development-wise. When you get that far, spring for the training or even support. In the mean time, pick the funnest looking $10 doc and get it.

Of course, this is just my opinion from my experience so far. Anyone disagree?

[starksm64]

All of our docs will be freely available in the not too distant future.

[parramorej]

I bought a 1-year subscription back in mid-June and have yet to see an update available against it, over several 3.2.X releases. From that lag alone, I'd opine that it's not worth it, as opposed to having bought one or two of the main documents.

I've had to plow thru the forums (not always the most responsive) and download release notes from SourceForge to find out what'd changed, if anything.

Also, if JBoss is moving to make the full doc set freely available, it would appear to make even less sense to buy the subscription.

The most help from JBoss that I've had was thru the initial documentation set and an admin class (where we had most of the same documentation set), and discussions with the instructor at said class. So the admin (and/or advanced class) might be worthwhile. As far as paid support, goes, we're still weighing that option.

All of the above is IMHO to be taken with grains of salt as needed. Or not.