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Books on XPages: from very good to very bad

Fri 10 Dec 2010, 10:23 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
In building the Virtual Bookstore as part of the Lotusphere 2011 Sessions DB, I originally thought that I would avoid editorializing and include every relevant book.  Nothing squashed that idea faster than looking for books on XPages.  There are two books out that are explicitly about XPages, and one looks very, very good and will ship by Lotusphere.  The other looks very, very bad, and is available now.  Save your money and wait.
 
 
Very, very good.  Recommended
This was written by members of the XPages development team, and is highly praised by those who have reviewed, and highly anticipated by anyone else in the know.  Order it now, and you should get it the moment it arrives, shortly before Lotusphere.  Seriously, go order it and come back.  I'll wait.
 
 
 
Very, very bad.  Not recommended
This book, titled "Xpages", was not written so much as ripped off from Wikipedia (they admit that on the cover), by people who seem not to know anything about the subject.  I won't even link to it, but I'll include the image and title to warn you off.  I will quote the one review, left by Wayne H. Mackirdy:
 
There is nothing of value in this book. I paid $38 for 9 printouts from Wikipedia. Really? There is nothing about XPages development - in fact, there is only one page about XPages in 65 pages. It then gives the Wikipedia articles for IBM, Lotus Notes, Domino, JavaServer Faces, Eclipse, etc. For the life of me, I see no reason for this book even being published! 
 
Inline JPEG image
 
 
Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any other books available.  Come on, authors, you can do better.  TLCC and IBM both have courses available, and those will be in the Sessions db, but if this is the big saving grace for IBM, wouldn't you think somebody could have jumped on it faster?

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What has been said:


927.1. Curt Stone (12/10/2010 05:38 PM)

Do you know if it builds an application from start to finish and includes source code for download? Thanks for the tip.


927.2. Ben Langhinrichs (12/10/2010 06:02 PM)

I don't know (although I'll find out and let you know), but this prompts another idea, which is to put Q&A on the books and courses so that people can ask, get answered (we hope), and future readers will benefit from the answers. Also, people can comment if they liked or didn't like the book, and why.


927.3. Ian Scott (10/12/2010 19:09)

I ordered "Xpages" from Amazon and was beside myself with outrage when I opened and inspected it.

Fortunately, Amazon had no issue in giving me a complete refund. I made broadly the same comments as Wayne H. Mackirdy in requesting that refund.


927.4. Paul Della-Nebbia (12/10/2010 08:45 PM)

@947.2 Ben ... Each TLCC course includes Q&A Instructor support via a course discussion database. Questions are responded to within 1 business day. There is the option to mark a question as "private for instructors", but most of the discussion is publically available to all course participants.

The duration of this Instructor support will vary from 4 months to 12 months.

Paul Calhoun provides the Instructor support for our XPages, Java, XML and Admin courses.


927.5. Martin Donnelly (10/12/2010 22:42)

@Curt - The Mastering XPages book is driven by practical examples and exercises whereever possible, and there is a sample NSF for almost all of the 17 chapters (one or two chapters are theoretical). The samples will be available for download from the Press web site. A lot of the examples are based on isolated snippets from the 8.5.2 XPages Domino Discussion template, e.g. enhancing or modifying a product feature to explain a particular point. There are also many standalone examples.