Recently I was involved in reviewing a book for Packt Publishing - Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials by Michel Schildmeijer. I am not writing this post because I reviewed this book but I had a chance to read the entire content of this book. This is a book written on the topic of WebLogic Server Administration after a very long time, and a good book too. If you are someone who works on WebLogic Server & JEE technologies you would certainly know about the scarcity of books on WebLogic Server and especially administration. WebLogic Server is being used as a commodity these days for many applications and products built on JEE platforms. Even though it is widely used there aren't many books available for WebLogic Server and the documentation serves as a good reference. But with the growing features on WebLogic Server in the past few years it is hard to learn for any new comers or who are non-developers if you are not following the product for a few years. This book comes as huge gap filler on this area.
The flow of this book would prepare you from planning to production and tuning with a good story line. As WebLogic Server is being used as the application server for almost all the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite of products Michel not only talks in the perspective of simple JEE applications but also talks about how WebLogic fits in the Fusion Middleware area which is a key benefits that you can ripe from this book. As WebLogic is rich in features especially the administration console, I expected a bunch of screen shots and less narration when I first started reading this book for review. But Michel really balanced between the content and the screenshots, which are presented wherever it is necessary. When I used to go around training customers for BEA and Oracle in WebLogic Server, I was always in need of a white board rather than prepared presentation contents. You can clearly see that need from this book which has many diagrams hand-drawn (Of course using some tool) to explain a lot of topics.
It would say the power of this book is the take off low and fly high approach to many topics, cohesive order of the topics presented to the viewers, compilation of real world experiences and best practices.
This is a good reading if you are a Oracle WebLogic Administrator or any Oracle Fusion Middleware product administrator or trying to become one. So if you are looking to learn or reinforce your knowledge in WebLogic Server this is a good book. And this is available both in printed and electronic format.
