Thursday, August 10, 2006
Book Review: “Java Transaction Design Strategies” by Mark Richards
Let me step up front that Mark Richards is an old friend of mine. He gave me first Java programming job and taught me a lot. As a matter of fact, I can remember him actually teaching me some of the things I came across in the book.
This is a very concise book that you can read quickly but one of those books you'll want to keep on your shelf as a reference. If you are a Java developer and you do anything with databases then you need this book. Transactions are one of things that everybody uses but often don't have complete understanding of because it just seems so complicated. But after reading this book you'll realize that nothing can be farther from the truth, transactions now will see easy! Mark does a fantastic job making the seemingly complex into a very easy to understand guide. But at the same time this ain't no guide for dummies either. You'll appreciate the thorough description of the three transaction models: Local, Programmatic, and Declarative and XA transaction processing. You'll also learn when each should be used and some of the common pitfalls. The rest of the book covers some design patterns that you'll use in designing your applications. One of the strong points of this book are the examples. Just about every example is shown in EJB 3.0 and in Spring. Both were new to me when I read this book but every single one of them made sense to me. But I can tell you I really can't wait to get going with EJB 3.0 and now I am intrigued to learn more about Spring.
So the bottom line is that I highly recommend this book for anyone that does anything with Java and databases. So I give this book five stars, two thumbs up, etc.
This is a very concise book that you can read quickly but one of those books you'll want to keep on your shelf as a reference. If you are a Java developer and you do anything with databases then you need this book. Transactions are one of things that everybody uses but often don't have complete understanding of because it just seems so complicated. But after reading this book you'll realize that nothing can be farther from the truth, transactions now will see easy! Mark does a fantastic job making the seemingly complex into a very easy to understand guide. But at the same time this ain't no guide for dummies either. You'll appreciate the thorough description of the three transaction models: Local, Programmatic, and Declarative and XA transaction processing. You'll also learn when each should be used and some of the common pitfalls. The rest of the book covers some design patterns that you'll use in designing your applications. One of the strong points of this book are the examples. Just about every example is shown in EJB 3.0 and in Spring. Both were new to me when I read this book but every single one of them made sense to me. But I can tell you I really can't wait to get going with EJB 3.0 and now I am intrigued to learn more about Spring.
So the bottom line is that I highly recommend this book for anyone that does anything with Java and databases. So I give this book five stars, two thumbs up, etc.
