Professional Java E-Commerce

Author: Subrahmanyam Allamaraju, Ronald Ashri, Chad Darby, Robert Flenner, Alex Linde
List Price: $59.99
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ISBN: 1861004818
Publisher: Wrox Press Inc (February, 2001)
Sales Rank: 64,302
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
Excellent coverage
This is the only book that covers such a wide range of issues relating to the application of Java to e-commerce. Although there are subjects that experienced users would certainly prefered to see treated in more depth this is an invaluable resource to those that need to get the big picture to a level that is practical and useful for understanding application and designing solutions. Well done.


Rating: 1 out of 5
Out of date and filled with fluff
Of all the technical books I've read this one qualifies as the worst. It's out of date, but even when it was new it would justify my opinion.

It attempts to cover too wide an area of subjects, and manages to either state the obvious (as in the first chapters that make a sophmoric attempt to define e-commenrce), to display questionable knowledge on the part of contributing authors, as in the section that lamely attempts to discuss architecture. The section on architecture should have been written by someone who could write and who understood architecture. Unfortunately I got the impression that the authors had neither qualifications.

The case studies were interesting, but were not sufficiently insightful to warrant buying this book that those alone.

There are positives to this book though. It weighs nearly 6 pounds, making it suitable as a doorstop. Having photos of all of the authors who contributed on the front cover is helpful if you conduct interviews since it helps in the screen process in case one of them shows up for an interview or tries to come in as a consultant.

My advice is to avoid this book. There are much better ones that cover the subjects in it.


Rating: 2 out of 5
Disappointing
There are a few good sections in this book (mainly the chapters that deal with WebLogic and the appendices of primers and reference material that comprise Section 6). However, considering that this book weighs in at over 1000 pages, its mainly fluff or glib (but not helpful), with too much material that states the obvious.

Much of the fluff is found in Section 1 (The E-Commerce Landscape), and Section 2 (Architecting Java-Based E-Commerce Systems) was, in my opinion, a glossed over, high-level overview that was used as filler.

Sections 3 (B2C E-Commerce Solutions) and 4 (B2B E-Commerce Solutions) have a few interesting chapters in each. My main complaint here is that Section 3 is a mix of solutions and techniques, while Section 4 is purely solution-focused. Section 5 (M-Commerce) is too light to be useful, and most of the material is already woefully out of date.

My recommendation is to pass this book up and, instead, seek out single-topic books that address the subjects in which you're interested.



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