----- Original Message ----- From: "Paris Apostolopoulos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 16:35 Subject: RE: Web Services book
Dear Steve! >I want to comment on your facts about the Ant book! I agree with your >process , but we can not compare a book about Ant that IMHO is something >specific and has a base version (eg. Usually basic tasks of Ant don't >tend to become obsolete after a new version), with a book about AXIS and >web services. So even the process of writing a book about itm I guess is >harder! I agree, mostly. Enough changes from ant version to ant version that your life is easier if you are up to date. e.g ant1.6 will have an <import> statement to import other build files, anything can be declared outside a target, lots of minor tweaks. But all your old stuff still works, and the rate of change is under control: ant ships yearly now, users can keep copies in SCM and old versions still run happily. Axis is different as it is releasing quarterly, a lot of changes are related to interop and w3c standards, some to security, so it is important to upgrade, even at the risk to your own code/sanity. And it has to adhere to so many external standards: JAX-RPC, SOAP1.1, SOAP1.2, WSDL1.1, the defacto interop interpretations, that the dev team has less freedom to fix things that are blatantly broken. Plus it has very, very minimal documentation for something so complicated. More javadocs would be nice. >As a student I still tend to believe that Oreilly has the best Java >books around my only exception is my personally favourite as a student >(Java how to Program by Deitel and Deitel) .I am insisting on Oreilly >because being into the uni I have the chance believe me to have a look >on many other books.(and only the AMAZON reviews) . Since now I found >that Oreilly has a more developer-centric in their books! But again that >might be only me! I like the ORA hacker ethos, just think that for many of the classic books: Servlets, Swing, Java Performance there are a few that are a let down. I also think that it is important for people who write books about OSS projects to contribute something back to the projects -bits of the book, code, even bug reports. It is, after all, a community effort. -steve
