Rating: 
Summary: Portlet stew
Review: As other reviewers have noted, this is far from being a professional (ie advanced) guide to portal development in Java. It is more of strange mix of articles and brief tutorials (of the kind that you might find on the net) vaguely related to portlet technology. A pitiful attempt to cash in on the first wave of a new and poorly known technology.
Rating:
Summary: An utter waste of time and money
Review: Having read the book description I was excited by what this book might have to offer. As it turned out I was utterly disappointed with my purchase.I think the word "Professional" listed in the title of the book is totally misleading. There is nothing professional about this piece of trash. The authors appear to have done little more than scrape together as much open-source documentation as they could muster, with very little original material to hold it all together. Explanations are either poorly written or very thin on content, there is no flow between chapters, and basically no focus to the book. Just a mish-mash of technology descriptions wrapped up in a Wrox cover. Overall I would rate this as one of the worst IT books I have every bought, and I've collected plenty over the last few years. If you're after a decent portal development book you'll be disappointed/annoyed with this one.
Rating:
Summary: An utter waste of time and money
Review: Having read the book description I was excited by what this book might have to offer. As it turned out I was utterly disappointed with my purchase. I think the word "Professional" listed in the title of the book is totally misleading. There is nothing professional about this piece of trash. The authors appear to have done little more than scrape together as much open-source documentation as they could muster, with very little original material to hold it all together. Explanations are either poorly written or very thin on content, there is no flow between chapters, and basically no focus to the book. Just a mish-mash of technology descriptions wrapped up in a Wrox cover. Overall I would rate this as one of the worst IT books I have every bought, and I've collected plenty over the last few years. If you're after a decent portal development book you'll be disappointed/annoyed with this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Respectable portal development book
Review: I have been developing software for three years and found this book helpful in writing portlet code for a BEA 8.x portal program i have been on for two months now. This book was also helpful for some javascripting that was needed for client side form validation i needed to implement
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent "soup to nuts" guide to portal development
Review: I have to agree with the other reviewers about how strong this book is, and how nice it is to find a book that covers JSR 168. The authors did a great job covering the whole portal development process. Here's the table of contents from my copy of the book:
Part I: Open Source Portals. Chapter 1: The Java Portlet API (JSR 168). Chapter 2: Searching with Lucene. Chapter 3: Messaging with Apache James. Chapter 4: Object to Relational Mapping with Apache OJB. Chapter 5: Content Management with Jakarta's Slide. Chapter 6: Portal Security. Part II: How to Build a Portal. Chapter 7: Planning for Portal Deployment. Chapter 8: Effective Client-Side Development Using JavaScript. Chapter 9: Developing Applications and Workflow for Your Portal. Chapter 10: Portlet Integration with Web Services. Chapter 11: Performance Testing, Administering, and Monitoring Your Portal. Chapter 12: Unifying the Enterprise Application Space Through Web Start.
Rating:
Summary: A good place to start for Java / OS portal developers...
Review: I ordered this book back in November 2003 and received it late in February of 2004. Needless to say, I was happy when I received it, but I was even happier to find that it contained a wealth of material that helped to me to understand the nature of portal development and therefore make more educated decisions in my own portal projects. I have been investigating a number options including PHP / Mambo, .Net's iBuySpy, and the various Apache offerings as well as Plumtree. The investigation has been daunting because there are so many disparate perspectives on the subject when it comes to standardization and implementation. This book does not necessarily solve the "grand design" problems associated with portal development, but it certainly helps to solidify one's understanding of the JSR 168 portlet spec and the tools available develop upon that spec. Given that understanding, one can gain a more coherent perspective of not only the solution, but really the problem itself. One of the problems with the open source community is that it doesn't have the same type of backing that folks like Microsoft have. Compare Jetspeed to .Net's iBuySpy. The .Net offering has way more documentation and it is far more cohesive and direct. Of course, that's because they want you to try it out and subsequently get entrenched in their product and so on. As an open source developer one is often left to fend for one's self through experience and hearsay. The learning curve can be discouraging to say the least. This book, however, helps to alleviate that suffering greatly. Also, it doesn't put me to sleep like O'Reilly books.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I was pleasantly suprised to find a book on JSR 168 and even more surprised with the excellent content of this book. The authors explain what it takes to make your portal's portlets JSR 168 compliant and they also give you valuable examples with popular open source tools. Nicely done - I highly recommend this book!
Rating:
Summary: I liked this book
Review: My brother bought this book for me for christmas because I told him I recently started some portal development work. I was hesitant at first to read it after seeing the varied reviews from the amazon reviewers but I was pleased with a lot of the book's chapters. The JSR-168 introduction, lucene implementation, and online chapter allowed me to easily build a functional portlet that I deployed on my BEA 8.1 portal.
Honestly, some of the content was not obvious to me from the start, but I believe my software development experience (10 years) allowed me to work through the book's examples. I would definitely recommend this book to other portlet developers.
My two cents. First. Almost all of the one-star reviewers claim the book's authors tried to "cash-in" on the JSR-168 specification, but it's common knowledge that technical author's don't make squat from these books. Second. These same reviewers have convinced themselves that better portlet books are on the horizon. I'm not sure about that, how else can someone describe how to encapsulate a web component with JSR-168 wrappers?, and besides, it'll probably be Q3 2005 or longer before these books do come.
Rating:
Summary: There is no Jetspeed in this book
Review: Read the title of the book that Amazon has:
Professional Portal Development with Apache Tools : Jetspeed, Lucene, James, Slide (Wrox Press)
However there is no discussion of Jetspeed. That is why I bought this book. (now watch since I have mentioned this Amazon will take the word Jetspeed out of the title). Jetspeed is mentioned once on page 211 that is it.
If you are thinking "wow, this book covers Apahce's Portal tools like Jetspeed -- I will buy this book". Well don't think that. Run. Run away from this book if you want Jetspeed. Chapter 9 goes through the configuration of the eXo portal but it is an old version of eXo. What you can download now from eXo is so different than what is in chapter 9 that it isn't even worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book
Review: The content of this book is top notch. Each chapter stands alone as an insightful overview of a particular topic (like Lucene). But the chapters are not tied together into a cohesive whole. I still highly recommend the book but it is not what you may think it is. You are not going to get a working portal from this book.
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