Cocoon Developer's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: A great tool to become used to Cocoon.
Review: Besides the necessary introductory work (performed nevertheless in an organic and rational way) the book is a real "hands on" manual. Useful for most of real-world applications.
Chapter 16 on Databases saved me a long work to retrieve otherwise sparse informations from the net.
A great lecture for 'self-teachin night owls'.

Rating:
Summary: Very well done
Review: Cocoon is a Java-based open source XML content manager and publishing engine from the Apache project. This book was written as an introduction to Cocoon for the developer with a good background in XML and Java but with no background in Cocoon. Part I of the book is an introduction to Cocoon. I found this part of the book to be very difficult and confusing. There was a lot of writing on Generators, Transformers, and Serializers, but the overall discussion was hard to follow. Fortunately, this was only the first 65 pages of the book. Starting with Part II, the book takes on a whole new and much better flavor. After a chapter describing how to install Cocoon, the authors go right into some real examples of how to use Cocoon. Suddenly all the information from Part I which felt incomplete started making sense. The examples and sample code (which need to be downloaded) are excellent in explaining how to use Cocoon. This section goes through example after example, each demonstrating more of the functionality of Cocoon. All the examples worked exactly as advertised and were well designed to demonstrate the many capabilities of Cocoon. Part III of the book discusses advanced topics such as database connectivity, web services, and integrating Cocoon with EJBs. Part IV covers design factors, administration, etc. The last two parts of the book are reference tools. Overall, I though the authors did a good job of making Cocoon easy to understand.

Rating:
Summary: Very well done
Review: Cocoon is a Java-based open source XML content manager and publishing engine from the Apache project. This book was written as an introduction to Cocoon for the developer with a good background in XML and Java but with no background in Cocoon. Part I of the book is an introduction to Cocoon. I found this part of the book to be very difficult and confusing. There was a lot of writing on Generators, Transformers, and Serializers, but the overall discussion was hard to follow. Fortunately, this was only the first 65 pages of the book. Starting with Part II, the book takes on a whole new and much better flavor. After a chapter describing how to install Cocoon, the authors go right into some real examples of how to use Cocoon. Suddenly all the information from Part I which felt incomplete started making sense. The examples and sample code (which need to be downloaded) are excellent in explaining how to use Cocoon. This section goes through example after example, each demonstrating more of the functionality of Cocoon. All the examples worked exactly as advertised and were well designed to demonstrate the many capabilities of Cocoon. Part III of the book discusses advanced topics such as database connectivity, web services, and integrating Cocoon with EJBs. Part IV covers design factors, administration, etc. The last two parts of the book are reference tools. Overall, I though the authors did a good job of making Cocoon easy to understand.

Rating:
Summary: A practical, detailed guide
Review: Cocoon is one of the showpieces of the Apache XML project. It is a powerful framework that allows developers to more efficiently set up, create, and maintain sophisticated Web-oriented applications. Cocoon has attracted widespread attention because it solves a substantial problem for Web developers. Yet Cocoon's reliance on a wide array of open source technologies and standards makes it very complex. And, unlike some other open source technologies, Cocoon's online documentation is sparse and inadequate. Lajos Moczar's Cocoon Developer's Handbook is a practical, detailed guide for intermediate to advanced level developers who need to learn how to implement the Cocoon framework in a Web XML publishing system. Cocoon Developer's Handbook is not a theoretical work about XSL, XSP, and XSLT standards, but rather a hands-on explanation of these technologies within the Cocoon framework, with examples and solutions to get developers up and running with Cocoon.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult made simple
Review: I bought the book Friday, started to read it that day (after work), continued the reading Saturday, and by Sunday evening I had ported almost the whole website for my workplace from Struts to Cocoon!

The book transforms a very complex subject to a comprehensible level, to the point that you will be Cocooning just after a few days like an expert!

My advice: GET THE BOOK!

RCS

Rating:
Summary: Good book to get started
Review: I found this book to be a great help for getting started with
the cocoon webpublishing framework. It is much easier to
understand and better structured than the documentation on cocoon.apache.org.

The only thing I didn't like is that some chapters promise information
that they don't provide. E.g. there's a "chapter" about writing a custom
transformer component, that I saw in the table of content and was eager
to read. It turns out that this is just half of a page explaining that the
author wil NOT discuss custom transformers. Also some other chapters
that scratch the surface of some advanced/complex topics lack the depths that I hoped for in a 700 page book.

But nevertheless the book is worth its money and I would recommend it
to anyone who plans his first cocoon project.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Darn Good
Review: I normaly spend my time cringing at the writing of computer science authors. This book is fairly straight forward. It skips a beat here and there, but not so much that it stops one dead in the tracks. It is an exhaustive read and only on the basics. I thought that more depth is eventually needed when Cocoon gets finalized, but this is about as good as it gets right now.

Rating:
Summary: A useful introduction to Cocoon
Review: I'm using Cocoon, and i was looking for a good book to help me in developing XML based web sites.
I buyed this book and i'm really satisfied. It is simple and complete. The book follows a well defined learning path. Some chapters, which analyzes advanced features in Cocoon(like SOAP, Internazionalization, ...), are extremely useful.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Outdated
Review: Sorry guys I know I should have wrote this one sooner. I went to a local bookstore here in Taipei and I bumped into someone who was buying this book. If only I could speak mandarin I would have told him that this book is simply OUTDATED because Cocoon has always been changing. It has never been, and may take a long time for it to be a full blown butterfly :)

The book is great. It taught me a lot of stuff. Let us just say buying this book is like buying a book with a title "Mastering Windows 95 in one month".

I am not going to preach on staying away as far as you can with Cocoon, not the book, even if it almost cost us our project but take a good, very good, look at the Table of Contents and see if the stuffs there are still supported by Cocoon. Or go to Cocoon website and decide on which stuff you would like to use (god bless you) and check if they are in this book.


If I am to rate this book regardless of whether or not its updated, I will give it 5 star or even 6. It's a great book for academic engagement ONLY.