In the new Java Magazin is a printed version of my review of “Apache Geronimo 2.1: Quick Reference” available. It’s only a short entry to this Java Magazin, but for the sake of completeness I listed it also in my publications section. However, this one comes with a DVD – on it are all Java Magazines from 2009. Thats pretty nice to have, esspecially because I didn’t have the time to read all the issues last year.
Posts Tagged ‘Bookreview’
Book review: Apache Geronimo Quick Reference
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
I recently got a copy of Apache Geronimo 2.1: Quick Reference
My first impression was: wow, is that really a quick reference? The book has a good format and comes with roundabout 370 pages. I hoped for a short book in these times I don’t have too much time for huge novels in the kind of “Gone with the wind”. However, I jumped through the content and figured out that this is actually a quick reference - very good for the impatient developers like me!
In fact, this book covers all relevant topics I can imagine: it starts with an introduction and a description of Geronimos architecture, which gives an brief (sometimes a bit short) overview of how Geronimo works with its plugins and its deployment strategy. I would have loved to read a bit more about the “hot deployment” feature of Geronimo. In JBoss world, this has brought me some headache. In this book it’s only covered with roundabout one page, just saying that it exists, were you need to place your files and how you can monitor that activity. Even later it’s not mentioned in special. Well, but that’s ok for a Quick Reference.
After this, one gets in touch with the most important knowledge of JMS, Database connectivity and JPA. Then there is an extraordinary good chapter about Security. Its one of the biggest chapters in this book and one can feel quite well how expierenced these guys are. Topics are handled in some kind of How-To way, like “Creating a new keystore” or “Changing a private key password”. These guys know what they speak about, probably the best chapter in this book.
Then it comes to CORBA, which I found also interesting, but to short in general. JNDI was reduced to the most important “put your hands there” information. Then it comes to Geronimo Plugins. This one was very interesting too and I wished to read more about it, but well, again, it’s short reference. You can find much Listings in this chapter, but I cannot say that they helped me too much without digging in the containers documentation.
In the administration chapter, the authors show the different portlets Geronimo provides for monitoring actions. It’s basically a walk through of the different pages of the Geronimo console. I think, this chapter could have been improved much more. For example, the Thread Pools Portlet is described with just one sentence: “…lists the thread pools defined in the server, and lets you monitor the thread pools.”. Ok, I don’t need a book for that information. Some other portlets are described a bit more in detail, but nothing which makes me to a Geronimo Guru.
Later you will have a How-To use the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin. It contains lots of screenshots which helps you to create a project specifically for the Geronimo. More impressive was the Cluster chapter. Clustering is a difficult topic and I would use this section for doing the job. It’s a good mix between explanation and reference.
Last chapter I was eager to see was the one with the Geronimo Internals. At some parts it reads like a smaller version of an API. It should help to develop own GBeans and it does, but not so much that I would have a huge benefit compared to the docs.
Final words: this one is really a reference and not a teaching book. If you would like to buy it, you should have some knowledge about JEE and about Containers in general. This book will not help you to understand the technologies behind. It’s more a collection of How-Tos, and that is what I expected from a Quick Reference. The authors made this point clear on the cover, were they are stating that you need to know about JEE5 concepts. At some points I would have preferred some more information. Sometimes I would have wished that they put not so much unnecessary listings (I don’t need import statements in java listing nor do I need XML-Comments in a 10 line XML file). I think, if you are developing an application, this book is a nice to have. If you are more an administrator and need to develop, package or cluster Geronimo, this book will probably give you some benefits. Especially the security chapter is well done.
However, thanks for this book, I like it, but it’s not one of my all-time faves.
Paul White – Basic MIDI
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Recently I read a lot of books about mixing/mastering etc.. I started this with reading one book of the wellknown series of Paul White – Basic MIDI. This book is well-written and has a logical structure. It’s meant for beginners in MIDI and I guess, this is true. Basic MIDI was not in-depth enough for me, as I have played with several Audio Sequencers the last 2 years. Sometimes it gave me a good overview about stuff I allready knew which actually helped me lots to categorize several components. The book is quite old, but you can read it even when you are not a keyboarder but an synth.musician who is working with f. e. Logic. If you are an GarageBand User you may get an overview too, but lots of the concepts and ideas introduced in this book cannot be done with GarageBand – I switched to Logic Express a while after reading.
Paul White starts with “What is MIDI”, explains a MIDI Sequencer (which is in fact an old Logic Version 
), gives an overview about MIDI synchronization and then about synthesis. However the chapter about “practical MIDI editing” is not very useful anymore. Things haven’t changed in the MIDI world, but the tools you work with have. Some stuff is much easier now.
However, this book is recommend for all who need an overview about what is a Sequencer, MIDI, Synthesizer, how to synchronize or connect MIDI devices etc. pp. For beginner this is quite simple, but I recommend to you to play with an tool like GarageBand for a while before reading this introduction. Some terms are much easier to recon if you have done so.
If you have played for 2 years or above, this book will give you nothing new which is no surprise, when reading the books title “Basic Midi”. For at the moment 7 euro it’s a nice to have book. 3 of 5 stars for me 
Music in theory
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008II suddenly woke up and realized that my only chance to continue my musical work is to learn everything i can get about music theory, means, harmony. I bought several books and wow, there are a lot of quality differences. Some authors think the reader is a stupid idiot, just buying that book for impressing (or depressing?) his friends.
Well, the german book “Harmonielehre und Songwriting” from the authors Fritsch, Kellert and Lonardoni is not like those books. It’s a great and very, very compact reading. On a half page they might explain what the circle of fifths (Quintenzirkel) means. Well, in fact you don’t need any more explaination. What these guys write is straight forward and easy to understand. Just at a few pages there are a lack of words. This is for example when they explain the bass clef; it’s a bit to compact and you have to read carefully to understand that you can combine violine clef and bass clef. A beginner will get out very much out of this book by reading just the first 100 pages and understand, what f. e. a perfect cadence is. I recommend this book to every german speaking musician who wants to learn about harmonies and how you build them up.
