Oracle JDeveloper 10g Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Good book for beginners, but limited for IT professionals
Review: If you're coming from an Oracle Forms background, or have a technical background, but find the JDeveloper IDE a little too daunting with its mired of windows, this *is* a *good* book to start out with. I read this book front to back, and it does build your confidence in making your way around the IDE and using it's productive features.

The Oracle OTN website also provides a number of tutorials and papers that will do the same thing. The nice thing about this book is that similar tutorials and examples are collated together and presented in a logical progressive structure, so it's good value as apposed to learning everything yourself.

Where the book falls down, once you understand the tool, is how the technology fits together. The book *does* give detail on programmatically attacking the ADF Business Component layer. However discussions and experience on coding from the Struts/client/controller layers with the associated iterators is thin on the ground. Only one chapter mentions UIX, in not enough detail to make you productive, and little mention of ADF Faces which will receive a greater focus of the JDeveloper product in the future.

So in summary, a worthwhile book to pick up if you're just starting - 4 stars. Make sure you do read it from start to end. However don't expect to be writing enterprise level systems at the end of this book.... a lot of hard yards still need to be learnt, or alternatively, an "Advanced" JDeveloper book needs to be written - so this book is 2 stars for advanced users - it's not a handbook as such.... and gets 3 stars all up from me.

Rating:
Summary: Integrating Java with Oracle
Review: JDeveloper is a development environment that helps you to develop enterprise level applications written in Java that are tightly integrated to the Oracle database. This is a book on the development environment itself, not on the applications that you may be developing. While you could, of course, use a simple text editor to write code, using a development environment will assist by providing tools to make the code better, faster to write, and most important much more bug free.

The database integration is the specific area in which JDeveloper is separated from other Java development tools. JDeveloper provides for database connectivity in a way that greatly simplifies the development of a business application getting data into or out of a database. Since it was written by Oracle, it obviously concentrates on using Oracle. If your company is an Oracle user, this approach is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: It is not a Handbook. It is a Good Guide
Review: The authors told us in the introduction part of this book that it is for "both Oracle developers who want to make the transition to the J2EE environment and also Java developers who want to leverage the productivity tools and frameworks available in JDeveloper". The authors have done an good job to satisfy this scope, though I feel time by time that this is book is actually written for Oracle developers who have already exposed to Java/J2EE technology and also J2EE developers who possess basic knowledge about Oracle database technology. Otherwise, I do not recommend you to start your journey from this book. It could be too difficult. Further more, if you want to learn how to use JDeveloper 10g as your Java development tool, this book is not designed for you.

This book gives a good overview of the introductory information about JDeveloper 10g and many related J2EE technologies developed by Oracle. Such overview coverage is further enhanced by about 25 well-designed step-by-step hands-on practices, which are very helpful.

It is true that you may find a lot of learning material from Oracle Technology Network. However, I feel this book offers the unique value by covering this quite extensive and diversified subject in an organized way. By reading this book, you will certainly improve your productivity since JDeveloper 10g is a great tool and since otherwise you may feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information you may find online.

This book is based on Oracle JDeveloper 10g production release of version 9.0.5.1. The current Oracle JDeveloper 10g production release is of version 10.1.2. I found some of the step-by-step instructions may need slight modification due to the difference of the two versions, though I do not think it posses much difficult to any experienced readers.

Chapter 5, Java Language Concepts for JDeveloper Work, gives a very brief overview of Java concepts. Well, if you need to read this chapter, you are not ready to read this book yet. The good news is that this chapter is only about 30 pages long, less than 5% of this thick book. The development of the rest of the story is in a quite logic and readable order.

The authors explain to us that "this book is a `handbook' not in the sense of a complete guide to all areas of the tool, but, .., a guide for creating J2EE applications using JDeveloper". It is interesting why they still insist to call it a handbook. This book covers only many of the basic features of JDeveloper. If you are advanced, and if you need quickly find a good coverage on an important but advanced features, most likely this is not the book that will give you an answer. Many of the books by Oracle Press are already written in somewhat quite a technical manner. Calling it a handbook may actually scare away those who are new to 10g. You do not start studying a subject by reading a handbook, do you?