J2EE Design Patterns Applied is a new book from Wrox Press on how to work patterns from the Gang of Four, the Sun Java Center, TheServerSide.com, and elsewhere into your J2EE applications.

The book is not so much a collection of patterns but rather the focus is on solving problems with patterns and devising implementation and deployment strategies.

Each chapter is oriented around using patterns to achieve a specific purpose or more generally contribute to a goal. These include:

- How to apply patterns to construct a robust and manageable web tier
- How to apply patterns to create a reusable persistence framework
- How to use patterns to improve performance and scalability

Check out the book on Wrox.com

View the book on Amazon

Related: EJB Design Patterns book on TheServerSide.

Is it possible to post a couple of chapters in PDF format to wet the apetite of your readers?

I usually do not like wrox books with few exceptions. The books are too long and contain repetetive information or dwell on simple things.

Totally agreed, O'Reilly books are much better in quality.

We're aware of these criticsms about such things as the number of authors and length, and we're taking steps to change things. It was a strategy that proved successful at one time - the curse of being overly successful with the ASP books. Now we recognise the issues, and many of our forthcoming titles are smaller, with few authors, and with much greater consistency across the book.

Please keep the feedback coming, without we cannot know what we need to keep and what we need to change.

Michael Kay's XSLT book from Wrox is excellent, if you want a contrast :-)

I totally agree.

Michael Kay's book has become my bible when building XSL templates.

Greetings,

As a Wrox reader, author (I was one of the authors on the J2EE Design Patterns Applied Book) and now technical reviewer, I can understand and appreciate many of the comments made about Wrox books.

I have worked for about 8 years as a software developer and have spent more than my fair share on Wrox books. There are some excellent Wrox books out there and sometimes some not so excellent Wrox books :,>

However, I would not dismiss the Wrox books out of hand. They are extremely useful as references and teaching books. I teach at the college and university level and I have yet to walk into a bookstore that does not have a few Wrox "big books" on their shelf. The wide variety of topics in these books provide a lot of material for teaching classes and a lot of different viewpoints.

I would be remiss if I did not admit that I have a lot of O'Reilly books on my book shelf. These books are excellent books, particularly when I want to dig into one particular topic.

I have worked with Wrox for over two years now. They are working very hard to meet the changing needs of their readers. Many of their new books have fewer authors and a much narrower focus.

They have been very sensitive to the reader feedback and I have seen it in both their editoral and book proposal process. I challenge the J2EE community to keep giving feedback to Wrox. Be vocal :,>

As for the J2EE Design Patterns Applied book, I am very happy with how the book turned out. It is not a "catalog" of patterns. All of the authors on the this book worked hard to try to produce a book that is very hands-on and applicable to the day-to-day challenges a J2EE software developer encounters.

As with all of the books I have worked on, I welcome both positive and negative feedback. I always publish my email address in my books. If anyone has questions or comments about this new book, I always welcome them. My email address is john_carnell at yahoo dot com.

             Thanks,
               John Carnell

It's great to have someone from the book on board, John. And thanks for offering your email for questions about it.

Actually, I wonder if you might be able to speak to the possibility raised earlier about getting a couple of PDF chapters made available. As a past Wrox author myself, I know it was possible back a couple years ago. I wonder if the "new" style of doing things would show them open to it still.

I know it makes a great difference to be able to preview the book that way, and on this forum in particular, it's shown to be a widely accepted approach.

/charlie

Hi Charlie,

I will speak to my editor about it. I know I have always use d the serverside to "preview" several books before I bought them. I will drop him an e-mail and see what he says.

  - John

Thanks. It's all the more important because the Table of Contents offered at Amazon is pretty paltry (showing only the 8 high-level section headings). Sadly, even that offered at wrox.com (http://www.wrox.com/ACON11.asp?ISBN=1861005288) also shows only those 8 headings. Could you at least post for us the complete TOC? (And work to get the Wrox site to offer it, as well. Maybe someone at Wrox could also push that to Amazon.)

<
I saw your book dealt with performance and scalability and thought the participants in this thread would be interested
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If you know of anyone that wants to monitor there code, please refer them
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Note:
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Another good example of a single author book from Wrox is "Expert One-on-One: Oracle" by Tom Kyte. It has rapidly become the new bible of Oracle developers.

I did notice that Wrox now publishes samller books with fewer authors (meaning fewer than a dozen but still more than a couple), at least WRT J2EE-related books (may be superior offerings from O'Reilly and John Wiley made this happen?). At any rate it's a good start. However, the number of titles is still unwieldy on M$FT technology books. At last count, there are more than a handful of titles on .NET, VB.NET, C#, and ASP.NET, many of which repeating the content of each other. I'm afraid to say if this situation does not change soon, the reputation of Wrox will be damaged permanently.

I agree that most of Wrox's books are overworded but some of them are really amaizing. The criteria to predict whether a book is coheisive and precise is as following. The less number of authors the better the book. As an example I list SQL 7.0 for Professionals and XML Bible. Both of them are paradise!
P.S. O'reilly sometimes issues too tangled books and I preffer PH-PTR of WILLEY.

I saw this book in the bookstore yesterday, and it is surprisingly thin, about half the width of the typical Wrox book.

I agree that the usual Wrox "kitchen sink" approach is overwhelming, and I typically avoid this publisher because of that.

I found a sample chapter here.

If only the can improve their books cover design!

Back in 1998 and 1999, Wrox has a very good ASP Book series. Now, I don't even bother looking at them because:

1. So many authors writting a book, therefore, the book is less cohesive. The different example for each chapter.

2. Each author has a few chapters to write so he packs so much junk and repeated information.

3. Heavy and expensive.

I agree, that when the book is written by many authors, information there are inconsistent and somehow redundand. But, there are also I think really useful books (Professional JINI, etc.) from Wrox.

Do you guys have an idea as to how these books sell in 3rd world countries like India, Srilanka etc? Hot Cakes!

I hate them for they are not cohesive, repetetive information etc, but there is no choice since Oreilly books come late in these Markets.

You can typically find the Wrox publications hitting the stand within 2 months of their release in US.

I wonder how much revenue they earn by subsidizing and selling large volumes in 3rd world countries