6 Replies Latest reply on Sep 3, 2009 6:30 AM by asookazian

    any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?

    jeanluc

      Has anyone read the book? Is there anything covered in it not covered already in SiA or Yuan's ?


      Thanks,
      -jl

        • 1. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?
          asookazian

          I am due to receive a paperback copy this Thursday of that book (and write a review for DZone within 6 weeks along with one for a Hadoop book).  I already looked at the table of contents and unfortunately it looks very similar to the Manning and Prentice Hall books in terms of topics/coverage.  Plus it's strange that the version in the title is 2.x and not 2.0 or 2.1 or 2.2.


          http://www.packtpub.com/article/seam-2-x-web-development-table-of-contents


          I think there are enough Intro to Seam books out by now.  In total, I own five (and this will be the sixth) Seam book since Seam 1.x.


          But the community really needs a Seam Recipes or best practices book which looks at multiple use cases or projects and shows how to apply design patterns, performance optimizations, AJAX frameworks, etc. in depth.


          The problem is that since most of these books stick to the standards you don't see too many Seam books (I haven't so far anyways) talking about Wicket, Flex or GWT integration, for example.  Or introducing a Seam Maven archetype or building your app using Gradle with Groovy scripts (rather than the typical xml approach with Maven or Ant).


          Even Wicket in Action uses Spring (not Seam) as the multi-layered JEE example towards the end of the book.


          A book on Web Beans, JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1 and the rest of the JEE 6 stack with Seam 3 would be good.  Which I'm sure would end up being introductory as well.


          Hopefully there will be an update to SiA for Seam 3.


          Any other related books worth reading?  Like Java EE 6 books?  There's an Apress book out but haven't had a chance to read it yet...

          • 2. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?
            cash1981

            I was asked to review the book and wrote a small review here

            • 3. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?
              david.salter

              Hi,


              I've read it and I thought it was good ;)


              The book basically covers everything you need to get started writing Seam applications.  The book starts by giving the reader a grounding in Seam and Facelets before moving on to other subjects such as RichFaces, testing, database persistence etc.  You can see the TOC and some sample chapters on the Packt web site.


              The majority of the book is applicable to Seam 2, however I cover the Seam identity APIs later on in the book which are only available with Seam 2.1 onwards.

              • 4. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?

                Agreed, I wish there was a book dedicated to covering every-day solutions to problems using Seam.  Most of the Seam books I've read thus far regurgitate a lot of information from the Seam Documentation.  I'd like to see new approaches or design decisions that I haven't thought of that I could apply to my own projects.  Now that would be sweet.

                • 5. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?
                  asookazian

                  I have submitted my technical review for the book and got a response from Lyndsey (Community Relations Manager @ Dzone) stating that the content/formatting does not comply with standards.  It's also over the 1400 words maximum (1500+).  So it may be a while until it's published.


                  The book is good for a Seam beginner but I really do not like Packt books (assuming that all of the books do not use numbers or captions for the figures/pics which is totally unprofessional) so far.  Some of the material was seemingly randomly placed.  For example, the AJAX4JSF and RichFaces material were in two different chapters.  There was no coverage of SMPC which is terrible.  There were several typos/mistakes in there as well like a reference to build.properties instead of seam.properties.  The author introduced Facelets in ch. 4 IIRC which is way too late and should have skipped the JSP examples completely now that Facelets is endorsed in JSF 2.  Also, there were some Servlet code examples in there.  wtf?  Servlets with Seam?  Only servlet I've known of or used in Seam apps in 2+ years is javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet which is a front controller and unlike the Spring DispatcherServlet, does not delegate to another Controller servlet, but directly to a backing bean in Seam apps.


                  It is not a heavy read like the SiA book so it was some-what high-level and to-the-point with no weird stories or b.s. like some of the Manning books.  Lots of code examples as well.  Pretty good coverage of OpenID which is not available in SiA.  I was unaware of OpenID until I read about it in this book so that's something I learned.


                  Anyways, it will be available soon I guess.

                  • 6. Re: any feedback on David Salter's 'Seam 2.x Web Development' book?
                    asookazian

                    http://books.dzone.com/reviews/seam-2x-web-development



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