> I wrote a book on Ant with Erik Hatcher last year (product placement:java > development with ant, http://manning.com/antbook). You can look at our > progress through Ant's CVS log and the bugzilla system: we found oodles
I found Erik and Steve's ANT book excellent. Before I read that book, I was wondering how someone could write a 700 page book on a simple tool like ANT. Well, as it turns out, the book is much more than ANT. It is a mini-J2EE (as well as Open Source tools/frameworks) tutorial and everything is nicely tied together using ANT. A chapter of that book discusses Axis. I wish it could discuss Sun's JAX-RPC too. Anyway, I highly recommend that book. Manning has been publishing a lot of excellent books these days. cheers Michael ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read Michael Yuan's technology articles http://www.enterprisej2me.com/articles.php Dr. Dobbs Journal, JavaWorld, IBM developerWorks and more ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Steve Loughran wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Paris Apostolopoulos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 13:05 > Subject: RE: Web Services book > > > > >I should point out that some of the Irani and Bashar is wrong, because > those bits in Axis havent ever worked. Example: Global Fault handling > and lifecycles. If they'd >>>> >written code to test these things, they > would have noticed. The fact that they didnt, worries me. The source is > there, why didnt they delve into it? > > >�hat is true but its not the only book around that happens to have > invalid and bad code..I can mention several other examples .Especially > when it comes to the AXIS world where still things are being developed > and the web services world is still 'under construction' , then it might > be a bit normal. But I agree with you they shoould have tested the > code..some of their mistakes in the code are quite...bad. > > > In the open source world there is no such thing as stability. in > particularly, with point releases on a regular basis and the new source > visible, books visibly date faster than books against closed source, even if > the effective lifespan is the same. (i.e. a book about .net1.0 is 100% > accurate till .net1.1 ships, whereas OSS books slowly decay) > > But at the same time, there is an opportunity > 1. you can see what is changing and revise the book to match, as you write > it > 2. you can file bugreps easily > 3. you can fix things as you go along > > I wrote a book on Ant with Erik Hatcher last year (product placement: java > development with ant, http://manning.com/antbook). You can look at our > progress through Ant's CVS log and the bugzilla system: we found oodles of > issues and inconsistencies. We could have written about them, but it was > often easier to fix the bug as that benefits more people. Oft times we'd > write about something, then go back and fix it and rewrite stuff. Then other > people would change things and we'd have to rewrite it. by the time we'd > finished we'd been through every class in the 150K line project, edited > their java doc comments and generally struggled to keep up to date with > changes. But the end result was we froze the code on the day ant1.5 shipped, > and the process we used to generate the reference appendix is going to be > the future of ant's autogenerated documentation: > http://nagoya.apache.org/gump/javadoc/ant/proposal/xdocs/build/docs/manual/ > > In comparison the other books on ant (by ORA and sams) went for the rewrite > of the documentation tactic, which takes a lot of drudge work and (in my > biased opinion) doesnt add as much value. So the ORA ant book came out in > may, six-eight weeks before ant1.5, yet was based on ant1.4. That was the > wrong move, and you can see it in their amazon sales ranking, which is 1/10 > ours. But the third book, the sams one, is (mostly) up to date with ant1.5, > yet it gets completely ignored, even though I do think it is better than the > oreilly book. People do make brand driven choices, when they are not always > appropriate. > > >>I hope Oreilly will have a book about Axis too! > >>They are, but that doesnt guarantee quality. It guarantees some sales > >regardless of quality, but does not mean that it will be the perfect > >book. That depends on the authors. > > >Well I tend to belive that Orelliy has more Java oriented books in > >comparison with WROX and to tell you the truth most of my Java related > >books happen to be Oreilly publications! > > I would recommend you should be ruthless and judge each book on its own > merits. > > > >I have read 2 other books from > >Oreilly about Web services (Java and SOAP , Building Web services with > >SOAP) , they were not bad but a bit abstract in some cases! > > There are at least two members of the Axis dev community working on axis > books, including James Snell. As long as the authors are good at explaining > themselves, they should be good books as the developers dont just understand > the 'what' of axis, they will understand the why -the design decisions, the > future options, etc, etc. > > > >Anyway its not bad to have a range of available books about > >AXIS..especially for the newbies.Because right now IMHO,..for the > >absolute newbie 'AXIS the next generation of SOAP' is the best > >available book! > > I agree. > >
