Computing Internet Books

This is a step by step guide if you want to get started with Coldfusion. I didnt have any experience in Coldfusion and this book gave me confidence that I would be able to learn it quickly. I have brought it for a month now and it looks good. I also brought ColdFusion 7 book by Ben Forta as another reference. I will start with Apress book first and then the Forta as I believe it will cover more topics and would be helpful if I knew the basics first. Good book, handy for starters in Coldfusion using Dreamweaver as their dev tool. Amazon service was good. Reached me in time. Would buy again from here for sure.

The title of this book is a straight-forward description of the contents - a book designed to meet the needs of new ColdFusion developers who are learning CFMX 6.1 by using Dreamweaver MX (DMX) 2004.

Compared to the CFMX "bible" - Web Application Construction Kit, this book is lean, comfortable, and informal. The basics of working with databases, writing in ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), using conditional logic, and form processing are covered in the first half of the book. The topics are covered briefly with simple examples. If you don't grasp the concepts and usages presented, you may need a second reference for more detailed information.

You'll definitely need a database-specific reference if you're not familiar with Structure Query Language (SQL) or your datasource is something other than MS Access. The authors' hints about writing queries and CFML code suggest best practices for making easy to read, reusable code. Queries are designed using the built-in DMX 2004 panels and tools. This gives a developer coming from the webmaster side of the internet assistance in composing SQL with filters and sorts, then allows you to view the generated SQL.

The authors list the most useful tags to know with simple, clear explanations of what they do. Practical examples are used to display both code and the resulting browser output. Be warned though, there are typos and odd phrasing in some spots.

More advanced chapters cover topics like maintaining state by storing information in persistent variables, exception handling for error management, and code reuse through User-Defined Functions (UDF), custom tags and CF components (CFC's). Topics are limited to a few pages each, so there is not a lot of in-depth coverage. A full chapter is devoted to working with XML and another to Flash MX 2004 and web services.

A nice feature of the book is the last chapter which pulls it all together into a web site featuring an image gallery, login administration and content management. Overall, it's a good book for a fast learner, although you may need more in-depth coverage as you grow in your development.

This book starts out slowly if you already know ColdFusion, but then it jumps quickly into dynamic Web development using ColdFusion MX 6.1 in conjunction with Dreamweaver MX 2004. Most other Dreamweaver books usually try to do too much by also covering ASP, PHP, or JSP. Such books have failed where this one succeeds in giving the reader a comprehensive and well illustrated guide to one technology, rather than gloss over several at the same time. In addition to the bread and butter things you can or should do in ColdFusion for a Web site, the book devotes two whole chapters XML and Web Services, and the last chapter gives a case study of a complete ColdFusion-based Web site. Yet, despite having six authors, it comes in below 500 pages and does not look at all like those bloated volumes which try to explain everything under the information technology sun. If you are looking for a reference book covering all the details on ColdFusion or Dreamweaver, look elsewhere. If you want a book you can read and use in your day to day work, this is definitely it.

This is in respose to David J. Wilkinson
f(n)=n is NOT a constant function

Just to write n in binary you need log(n) space/time
remember, we are not talking about what happens in a C/C++ or some other compiler. We are talkign about theory here. In C you would represent a number as lets say 32 bit int, in that case the function f(n) is constant, assuming n is always less than 2^32, but this is not true for the general case.

Just so no one studying for the test gets confused, f(n) = n is in fact a constant funciton.

In this context constant means that its execution time does not vary based on the imput.

Compare this to a bubble short algorithm where the excecution time would vary accourding to the square of the number of items.

So 10 item would take 100c time units to sort, 1000 items would take 1 million!

If you are thinking about taking the GRE Computer Science test, buying a review book is probably a good idea. However, do not, under any circumstances, buy this one. If you cannot find a better review book, consider buying the latest Michael Crichton novel, or perhaps a collection of The Far Side comics, because either of them would be more useful for test preparation than this book.

I bought this book in preparation for taking my GRE subject test, and was incredibly discouraged after taking some of the sample tests contained within. Most of the questions I was unable to answer, and the answers given in the book often left me scratching my head and wondering what the writers were talking about. I was about to actually cancel my appointment to take the test, when I decided to give the official sample test sent to me by ETS a try. On that test, I was able to score in the 91st percentile. I haven't taken my official test yet (it is tomorrow morning), but, assuming that the real test is not drastically different from the official sample (a real test from 1996), the questions in this book bear no resemblance to any of the questions on the real test.

Having read all the reviews I am not quite sure why people are so unhappy. Yes, this is not an exciting page turner, but it is not supposed to be. It sais on the cover "4 Full-Length Exams" and this is what you get, sample exams and explanations for questions. There will never be a book that will tell you how to "crack" the CS GRE, because such a book would have to contain the information of about five textbooks.

The only way to study for a CS GRE is to use this book to get an idea of the questions (plus the sample test ETS sends you). If you cannot answer the question then go to a textbook and read the corresponding chapters, so when you come back you can answer the question.

Ideally, you are a CS Junior in Undergrad and know that you will be taking this test. This way study for this from the start, while still in class.

OK, this book is terrible, like everyone said. I didn't buy it: I got it free from a colleague at work. I used it for the sole purpose of practicing answering CS-type questions quickly and filling in the bubbles. Here are a few of my pet peeves:

1) The book assumes an expert-level knowledge of PASCAL and no knowledge of C. The sample test from ETS requred only basic C and PASCAL. Since I didn't know PASCAL at all (who does these days?) until I studied for the GRE, I really hope that the ETS test is closer to the real thing.

2) Questions that are far more difficult (both in terms of knowledge required and time required to answer) than anything in the ETS sample GRE. There are questions where the "explanation" is more than 2 pages long.

3) Errors. To take one example I just met, they think that f(n) = n is a constant function.

4) Ambiguity/unstated assumptions in question.

To sum up, yes, this book [bites]. Don't pay any money for it. And come on -- will someone out there write a decent GRE CS review book??

Online games are, as the term implies, video games played over the Internet. Many of them have associated online communities that reach well beyond the closed world of traditional single-player home games. The most popular, World of Warcraft, boasts more than 10 million players worldwide.

While the world of online gaming is built to entertain, its creators and players fight the same IT threats as business-oriented networks. Today's 12-year old who is hacking World of Warcraft simply to cheat at the game could, in a couple years, be targeting corporate networks to more nefarious ends.

While the game attackers' goals are different, this book demonstrates the lengths to which they are willing to go to access a system. Those tactics are likely forerunners of software and network security challenges to come in other online arenas.

In Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, authors Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw offer a look at those threats. The book's 10 chapters provide a comprehensive overview of everything from game hacking 101 to reverse engineering.

The authors explain in depth why and how online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come, and manifest some that already exist. They describe how gamers have created billion-dollar virual econ-omies, how to build a bot to play a game for you, why players cheat, and even how game companies invade players' personal privacy.

Most important, the authors describe how game creators overcome a security issue only to have it defeated by the hackers. Sound familiar? This never ending "Spy vs. Spy" scenario is obviously frustrating to the game creators and underscores the critical importance of building effective application security into the fabric of the game.

Both Hoglund and McGraw have written extensively on the importance of software security. The sooner you and your software developers read their most recent book, the better off your software infrastructure will be. Your software is critical to your organization; protect it as well as the gamers do.

I really appreciated the detail the authors went into in order to explain how to pull off certain exploits. It was obvious that they had really tried them all hands on.

This book is a must read for anybody interested in online games or software security. Non-technical readers can skip over the detailed code for exploits, and will still gain an excellent overview of the problems that online games face. Those interested in understanding the problems in detail will undoubtedly enjoy the code as well.

One of the main problems discussed by the book is that online games include a lot of game logic on the client side to provide a responsive and enjoyable experience for players. However, the problem from a software security perspective is that attackers can modify the client-side logic to change some of the rules of the game to their advantage. Of course, client-side trust issues are a widespread problem in software, and are not limited to online games alone. The book discusses many other problems with online games (and massive distributed systems in general) as well.

This book has at least two advantages over many other software security books. Firstly, it should appeal to a wider audience that includes millions of online game players, thus increasing general awareness of software security issues. Secondly, it does not shy away from providing full source code for actual exploits, which should help software developers better understand what their software is up against.

I thought the book would contain more about FPS cheating and less about WoW. It's 90% about WoW. I don't work on an MMO so I got bored fast.

Not a horrible book, but not great either. I preferred Hoglund's Rootkit book since it had more generic approaches to subverting win32 processes.

If you work on an MMO, you should probably pick this one up.

By the way, you can read more in my book . . .
If you want to know more, buy . . .
Discuss further in my book and every other book printed by my publishing company . . .

This book is a mess of poorly explained code snippets and self promotion. Also, it focues 90% of its hacking on WoW. If you don't know anything about World of Warcraft, then you will be completly lost. I have /timeplayed 1000 hours, so I could follow all of the WoW references, but unfamiliar readers will not understand large parts of the book.

Half of the work in this book is just cut and pasted from code scattered on the internet. If you don't know C++, how to exploit the Windows OS, or modifying memory, these walls of code don't make much sense.

This is the first book I have ever returned. The constant self promoting and lazy cut and paste code just frustrated the hell out of me.

This is a very good book, running from the fundamentals to more advanced topics about MPLS. Easy to read.

MPLS Fundamental book contain essential information for any expert CCIP and CCIE.
However, the book contain the following items that make it complex and unsuitable
To a junior IT staff reader:

1. The lab/demos don't use one lab design. Learning each chapter (and sometimes
Any page) with a new lab design, make the self study learning hard.
Although the author tried to avoid this issue, the issue reoccur in each chapter.

2. Each into/overview after chapter 6 doesn't cover the learning purpose and the
Important information that the reader will learn .

3. The "Who Should Read This Book?" section should provide information that
Expert in routing (especially in BGP 4) is a pre-requirement to learn MPLS.

This is a fairly exhaustive book on cisco MPLS implementation. The name "MPLS Fundamentals" gives an idea that this is a good place to start with, ut unfortunately not. It starts at a basic level, but in no time dives in deep. Use this book only if you want to understand specific areas in depth and not for an overview. Also, if you have access to your own lab, you will find it much easier to follow along.

This is a book where you are given not only an in depth what it is and how its implemented of the protocol but you are also given great insight as to the why its done this way. You are given all of this in a very readable format. I agree with another reviewer that this is an exhaustive text into the internals of MPLS. I love the level of detail it goes into.

Nutshell review - If you want to know all about denial of service attacks then this is an excellent book to start with. Well written, easy to understand and excellent coverage of the topic.

Your take on this book really depends on where you are sitting. The authors lucidly describe what a Denial of Service attack is. More to the point, the book then goes into an explanation of its more dangerous variant - the Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attack. The book is really about the latter; not the simple DoS. We see how DDoS evolved rapidly from 1999 to 2005, with the number of computers hijacked to become agents for an attack expanding from hundreds to over a hundred thousand. And how it no longer seems to be done by joyriding hackers just seeking a thrill. Now, it may actually be a business; a major branch of malware.

You should have a reasonable background in understanding TCP/IP, to appreciate the book's technical discussions. For example, if you see mention of the TTL field in a header, you should already know what it means.

The book explains several postulated countermeasures to DDoS. Nifty ideas like traceback and pushback. Or perhaps doing an entropy count of good and bad packets, to help distinguish between them. The problem is that none of these are truly effective. DDoS is an unsolved problem. So if you are a cracker, this is good news. Not so for sysadmins.

But there is something else. Perhaps DDoS is fundamentally insolvable, under the current IPv4 and current router capabilities. But maybe this field is still young. What is a problem for many could be a chance for you, as a researcher or inventor.

'Internet Denial of Service' (IDOS) is an excellent book by expert authors. IDOS combines sound advice with a fairly complete examination of the denial of service (DoS) problem set. Although the authors write from the DoS point of view, as a network security monitoring advocate I found myself agreeing with many of their insights. Since there are no other books dedicated to DoS, I was very pleased to find this one is a powerful resource for managers and technicians alike.

IDOS features some of the best minds on DoS research available. Everyone has heard of Dave Dittrich, but I found the work of lead author Jelena Mirkovic to be particularly valuable. Peter Reiher and long-time DoS researcher Sven Dietrich also give the project considerable weight. All four authors work for or with universities, and IDOS reflects this academic connection by frequently citing papers and DoS research. For example, chapter 7 describe DoS mitigation approaches and Appendix C examines the best available data on DoS techniques. I would encourage other authors to make similar references to the academic community and not write in a literary vacuum.

By making references to outside works, IDOS successfully avoids repeating material published elsewhere. Chapter 6 was probably my favorite section, including much distilled wisdom and advice on responding to DoS attacks. I welcomed the authors' frequent recommendations to collect session and full content data. It is often impossible to detect and respond to attacks without this sort of network-based evidence. This point is often lost on vendors or consultants who lack experience performing incident response.

I had minor problems with the book. First, I would have liked more technical detail in chapter 6. For example, it would have been nice to see examples of system metrics from nodes or routers under DoS attack. Specific advice on host tuning techniques would also have been useful, e.g., make changes X, Y, or Z on FreeBSD or Cisco IOS to better resist DoS conditions. I was also slightly disappointed the authors did not base their discussions of commercial products in Appendix B on hands-on evaluations. I understand the problem with meeting this objective, however.

I did not have any problems with the legal or concluding chapters (8 & 9). I think the earlier three-star reviewer found himself on the wrong side of the 1999 "RST scan" controversy discussed on p. 52 and may not have been happy by the (correct) stance taken by IDOS.

I highly recommend every security professional read IDOS. It's a convenient and illuminating discussion of a problem that will never disappear. This book will prepare you to do battle with DoS attacks, and for that I am thankful.

There are obviously a multitude of ways an attacker can take your site down. One way is via a denial of service attack. There's a new book out that covers just that attack in great detail: Internet Denial Of Service - Attack and Defense Mechanisms by Jelena Mirkovic, Sven Dietrich, David Dittrich, and Peter Reiher (Prentice Hall).

Chapter list: Introduction; Understanding Denial of Service; History of DoS and DDos; How Attacks Are Waged; An Overview of DDoS Defenses; Detailed Defense Approaches; Survey of Research Defense Approaches; Legal Issues; Conclusions; Glossary; Survey of Commercial Defense Approaches; DDoS data; References; Index

Going into this book, I can say I knew about the basics of a Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. What I didn't understand is how sophisticated they've become. The book covers (in deep detail) how bot or zombie networks are developed and utilized to launch these types of attacks. I didn't realize that it's relatively easy to acquire a bot network of over 100000 clients who can flood a site with packets. And it's not even necessary to use them all at once. Attacks can start with a fraction of the clients, and then escalate as the victim attempts to filter packets or add bandwidth. It's a scary thing. The authors also cover the various issues involved in the defense of these types of attacks. Filtering might work, but it can be difficult to find the correct filtering parameters that don't also drop legitimate traffic. And due to the distributed nature of the attack, it can be nearly impossible to find the culprit, and worse, to prevent it from happening again.

Walking away from this book, you don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling about the current situation. Regardless of what steps you take, there is no current sure-fire method for defending these attacks. But by reading Internet Denial of Service, you'll be far more prepared to understand what's going on and what realistic options do exist. Better yet, it also gives you the steps you need to take to prepare your site for this type of incursion beforehand. If you've mapped out your plan ahead of time, you can definitely minimize (to some extent) the damage that can occur.

This is a good read for any security professional tasked with security and availability of an organizational website. Reading this now could save your job later...

Internet Denial of Service

I certainly enjoyed reading this book, in fact I started looking at it during the work day and couldn't wait for everyone to leave at quitting time so I could finish it. It seems to have a bit of trouble finding its niche, most of the time it has the feel of a research paper, but from time to time there are amazingly practical tidbits. If you are looking for a how to stop denial of service, step by step, buy the cup of coffee from Borders and leaf through the book and make your decision carefully. If you are a researcher in the USA interested in Internet protocols and US law and response, this is a must read, must have. If you are truly seeking to understand what zombie style distributed denial of service is and is capable of, buy the book and read it three times. My response team worked closely with one of the authors, David Dittrich from 1999 - 2001 and if there is a "been there, done that" individual when it comes to malicious code, he would be that person.

This is not a book for a novice, but if you know your way around a network and know a bit about routing, there are a number of helpful illustrations and code segments that drive the points home.

I realize I gave the book three stars even though I liked it a lot and that is primarily because the book is much weaker in the two final chapters, 8 and 9. You just can't throw issues like law, ethics, jurisdiction, evidence collection, and estimation of damages on the table, write a couple paragraphs and zoom on, someone could get hurt. For the right reader, this can be a wonderful resource.

I have read few software engineering books that have been perfect. Some of this book is not perfect. The wisdom in the text, in the white space and beyond, is priceless. It is important to consider that Robert Martin, whose books on the theory and art of object oriented software development, amongst other subjects, are immense. Robert worked with Booch, and his greatness stands on the shoulders of Booch. You may not get everything from a first read of this book, and thats the beauty - it distills so many ideas in some many ways, that every time you read it, you get to share in the vision and deeper ideas behind the concepts.

This will always have a space on my shelf.

College-level holdings strong in references for object-oriented programmers must have the 3rd updated edition of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications. It provides software engineers both in the field and at the advanced student level with a key reference to the industry, using numerous examples to illustrate foundation concepts, explain methods, and demonstrate successful applications across fields. New to this edition is a detailed introduction to UML 2.0, a focus on modeling with five chapters emphasizing different phases, advice on allocating team resources, and much more. Quite simply, a 'most have' for any serious collection.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

A favorite re-readable book for OO Analysis and Design

The author drives home the inherent complexity of software design and the need for OO analysis and design to alleviate that complexity. Current developers using an object-oriented approach and developers new to OO design and analysis can benefit from this book.

This book's reputation as one of the bibles of OOAD is probably deserved because (to someone relatively new to it) the essentials seem to be thoroughly covered. It just seems too much like wading through muck to find them.

The problem begins at the very beginning; on the first pages of the preface. In describing changes between publication of the second edition and this third edition, the author lists "robots are cruising on the surface of Mars" and "Personal hovercraft are available." Tongue-in-cheek?

Unfortunately, no, unless it's firmly planted there. As the book continues, the reader all too often wants to start skimming as paragraph after paragraph, sometimes page after page, of non-essential prattle clouds the essentials. For journeyman designers and developers, sections on the topology of old-fashioned procedural languages, on the importance of documentation, task planning, release planning (twice!) and more may be frustrating drags on learning the essentials of thinking through a good design and taking it to the doorstep of implementation.

A highly-simplified greenhouse application is used for examples throughout the first part of the book, leaving too many more-common scenarios unexplored and occasionally trapping skimmers who have not captured every concept in the design of that application along the way.

Late chapters illustrate some concepts with (finally!) other applications including an all-important (for many of us) web application as well as applications for satellite tracking, data aquisition for a weather station, artificial intelligence, and a control system for traffic management. Interesting, but again wordy and by the time you get there you're exhausted!

I did learn from this book, but I'm still looking for The Book that efficiently teaches OOAD, and I've read four or five already. So far I've learned more from a couple of implementation-level books: Martin Fowler's superb book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, and his UML Distilled. These have been very instructive in part because Fowler's style is lean and very clear, un-clouded by distracting non-essentials. I've just ordered Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development by Craig Larman. Fingers are crossed, maybe that will be The Book.

[A review of the 3rd EDITION, 2007.]

Booch et al teach Object Oriented analysis at a level separate from and independent of any particular OO language like Java, C++ or C#. The length of the discourse means that if you are uncertain as to how to make your classes, there is ample material here to draw advice from.

The early chapters focus on issues like notation. Necessary. But the meat of the text may be when the discussion moves onto the idea of levels of abstraction. Other developers might disagree, but this section seemed crucial to me. It talks about how to focus on behaviour, not representation or implementation. Then, it suggests how to progressively use different levels of abstraction to refine the design. En route, this should yield fruitful objects and systems of subobjects within an object.

An entire section, of 5 chapters, is devoted to examples of applications. Worth perusing to make concrete the ideas brought forth earlier in the book. Frankly, the book could have been considerably shortened, by reducing or even eliminating this section. But the authors chose correctly to furnish copiously fleshed out examples, as good pedagogy.

The text is also useful in giving a working acquaintance with UML. You might not necessarily know everything in UML by the end of the book. But you will be familiar with its main elements and its utility for describing relationships between coupled objects. Use case diagrams are also heavily invoked. Something else common to much OO design.

I had originally studied the Microsoft Press book "Microsoft Windows Scripting Self-Paced Learning Guide", but still needed more.

VBScript, WMI and ADSI Unleashed is the book that I wish I had read first. It is a good choice for a system admin who wants to start scripting administrative tasks.

Having never scripted before, I had many questions. This book started from the beginning, what editor should I use for programming, and took me all the way to my first scripted program....to search AD for all Servers at or below a specified OU, remotely attach to each server, determine if it is a physical or virtual computer, run a hardware configuration utility as appropriate, reconfigure the hardware as appropriate based on the utilities output and report back to me the results. I went from nothing to decent in about two weeks.

This is a good choice for this type of book.

What a pleasure! This is a book written for technical administrators, by a technical administrator with a knack for writing. Don Jones demonstrates a talent for explaining the intricacies of monitoring and administering a Windows enterprise using WMI & ADSI scripting (et al) in a perfectly comprehensible manner without coming across annoyingly simplistic or condescendingly academic. Computer book writers take note!

Hey all,

I was a noob in all of this scripting stuff when I bought this book. Frankly it was not a bad purchase but it did leave me kind of disappointed. The first few chapters are a waste of time because there just like a huge sales ad for the author's company that sells a VBScript IDE, added to that you never get that feeling that he's fully convinced of what he is telling you, i.e. "You should learn VBScript but it doesn't matter because we have the impending doom looming over called Windows Powershell".

Last but not least is the fact related to the title of my review, basically he stresses the point that to learn VBScript you should get the online documentation for it......then what the hell did I buy this book for? If I wanted to learn structured programming I would've bought a C++ book that will do a better job.

All in all, the book has it's good points..I just can't remember them right now 'cause I'm hungry and it's Christmas Day. It does give you the basic knowledge what scripts can do, although if you been a windows admin for a while then this will only confirm to you that there are other ways of doing stuff....and that you need the VBScript online documentation (which by the way was hard to find on Microsoft's website) to do them.

This is the only scripting book I've so sadly I can't give you an alternative to it or compare it against any but if you really are into self-learning I think that a little organization, time and all the documentation available at MS's website might do.

If you have the bucks to spare buy it, if you have time on your hands don't buy and turn over to the Net to learn.

I found this book to be very helpful and practical with the examples given in the book. The examples have come in useful for me for basic systems administration in my Windows Server 2003 network with Active Directory. The author breaks down the example codes line by line and explains what is going on, which I found to be very helpful.

one thing I did not like was that some times the author purposely put mistakes in the code without initially telling you. Then towards the end of the section, he will ask you why the code did not work and will tell you what went wrong and why. He doesn't do this all the time, but a few times. It made me second guess myself and thought that the publisher had bad typos in the code, something familiarly seen in a lot of programming books. Good learning experience, I suppose.

Even if you are a beginner programmer wanting to learn VBscripting, I think you would be able to get the gist of VBscript by copying the examples in the book and tweaking them for your needs. This is my first VBscript book and it's definitely a keeper for me. Highly recommended!

Hi

This is to the authors of this book:
Since I bought this book a few months ago and it is a good book for version 6.1

However, with 7.0 available...could you tell about your plans for an upgrade chapter/electronic chapters for those of us who actually need to catch up on 7.0 ?

If a book becomes obsolete (may be not the right word here - but meaning a book deals with older technology) this quickly....would you support your readers?

Thanks
Ravi

If you prefer print version of the online documentation here it is. Unfortunately, not much content in addition to that online component. Provides a solid introduction to weblogic and j2ee, although does not go into depth in any particular topic.

This book is certainly good. Very detailed. And it is cool.
But mind you this for Weblogic 7.0. and NOT 8.1.

And another thing is that the errata is not available for this book anywhere and there are some mistakes in the text/code.

If you are new to WebLogic and/or are somewhat mystified by J2EE buy this book. It's a great resource and it is totally worth the money. It helps you get up and running quickly without getting too bogged down in all the BEA documentation. I found the overview of the J2EE technologies very enriching and the demonstration of WebLogic's value proposition and capabilities easy to digest. It also has some very helpful and practical suggestions for working out some thorny issues with WebLogic server such as class loaders, deployment etc. I'm constantly referring to it. The author has really done his homework and has done a valuable service to the WebLogic developer community by writing this book. When I had a question regarding some portions of the text I emailed the author and he responded within hours! He not only helped answer my question but also pointed me in the right direction where I could do additional research. It's nice to see someone stand by their work like that.

like so many computer books, this is about 4 pounds of stuffing: w2k screen shots, very simple j2ee code examples, &c. if you want to learn EJB, get a real EJB book like Monson-Haefel (0-596-00226-2). for weblogic, stick to online docs.