I recently received a free copy of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook published by Packt Publishing for review.
Readers of technical cookbooks would know this genre of text includes problems that developers will hit and the prescribed solutions, in this case for Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF). Books like this excel themselves on excellent coverage, a logical progress of solutions through out the book, and providing a readable narrative around the numerous steps and code.
This book progresses well through ADF application assembly, ADF Business Components, the view layer, security, deployment and tuning. Each recipe had a clear introduction and I especially enjoyed the "There's more" follow up sections for some recipes that leads the reader onto related ideas and issues the reader really needs to be aware of.
Also worthy of comment having worked with ADF for over 5 years, there certainly was recipes and solutions I hadn't encountered before, this book gets bonus points for that.
As a reviewer what negatives can I give this text? The book has cast it's net too wide by trying to cover "everything from design and construction, to deployment, testing, debugging and optimization." ADF is such a large and sophistication technology, this book with 100 recipes barely scrapes the surface. Don't expect all your ADF problems to be solved here.
In turn there is inconsistency in the level of problems and solutions. I felt at the beginning the book was pitching itself at advanced problems to solve (that's great for me), but then it introduces topics like building a static View Object or train. These topics in my opinion are fairly simple and are covered by the Oracle documentation just as well, they shouldn't have been included here.
In conclusion, ADF beginners will find this book worthwhile as it will open your eyes to the wider problems and solutions required for ADF, and experts for just the fact they can point junior programmers at the book for certain problems and say "get on with it".
Is there scope for more ADF tombs like this? Yes! I'd love to see a cookbook specializing on ADF Business Components (hint hint to budding authors).
