Dear Steve! First of all I respect what you are saying since you are more experienced than me (undergraduate student here) but then again as you have said..sometimes Oreilly or Wrox want to sell..and to be more precise want to sell more and quickly!
I want to comment on your facts about the Ant book! I agree with your process , but we can not compare a book about Ant that IMHO is something specific and has a base version (eg. Usually basic tasks of Ant don't tend to become obsolete after a new version), with a book about AXIS and web services. So even the process of writing a book about itm I guess is harder! I had not the chance to read your Ant book , I will sure do. You are right the thing about people that usually buy brand-ed stuff is a bit unfair for the writers of alternative publications but anyway that is something that you know from the start! As a student I still tend to believe that Oreilly has the best Java books around my only exception is my personally favourite as a student (Java how to Program by Deitel and Deitel) .I am insisting on Oreilly because being into the uni I have the chance believe me to have a look on many other books.(and only the AMAZON reviews) . Since now I found that Oreilly has a more developer-centric in their books! But again that might be only me! My regards Paris -----Original Message----- From: Steve Loughran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 12:14 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Web Services book ----- 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? >Τhat 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/manu al/ 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.
