Rating: 
Summary: Excellent XDoclet resourse
Review: This book is great for developers who want to learn XDoclet from scratch and XDoclet power users. It is also divided up in such a way that, depending on where you are in the XDoclet learning curve, there is always a natural place to start.It begins by covering code generation in general and why it can be beneficial. It then give some basic examples of how to integrate XDoclet (and Ant) into your project to generate code. A good chuck of the book after this is broken down into the different domains XDoclet supports - servlets, EJBs, Hibernate, custom JSP tags, etc. As a Hibernate user, I have found XDoclet very useful, but having this book by side would have made getting started much easier! This brings me to the last big thing I like about this book's organization - about the last third of the book is strictly reference. So, even if you are an XDoclet expert, it still makes a very handy desk reference for the tags. So, if you want to learn XDoclet or if you want to become a more effecient XDoclet user, but this book. Ryan
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book starts with an overview of code generation and how and why XDoclet fits into your development projects. Xdoclet can generate code, deployment descriptors and configuration files. The authors fully explain how XDoclet integrates with Ant. If you understand Ant, you can easily follow the examples.
The authors then go through tutorials on how to use XDoclet with different aspects of Java development, EJB, web layer, JMX, Struts, etc. The example code and xml files are well documented and easy to follow. One of the best parts is the summary sections that how you how you benefited from using XDoclet and the number of files (code and deployment descriptors) that XDoclet generated for you. The last part of the book is a reference section, so this book is all you need to start using XDoclet.
Reading this book will also give you guidelines on the proper way to code a J2EE application using design patterns and source code organization. The authors cannot explain every topic covered in great detail, so you must understand the underlying framework (Struts, Hibernate, etc.) to use XDoclet, which is summed up by their admonition, "Don't generate what you don't understand." This book shows you how to solve real-world problems with XDoclet solutions. I would recommend this book (and XDoclet) to every Java developer.
Rating:
Summary: All cool stuff, serious book to serious Java developer
Review: When reading one of the reviews about this book before buying, I hisitated a little due to someone made it "down". But where is the other option. I got this book and started reading it...I cannot put it down. This book is really good one if you are serious J2EE developer and if you've been following up with most of cool Java technologies. The writing style and techical part of this book should be a model for most of those books about J2EE. This book helps me brush up J2EE from frontend to backend, with a lot of little trick and details I cannot get from XDoclet's website.
If you are J2EE developer, a serious one, you must get this book! It not only helps you create code, but it creates thoughts!
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