Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
-
Difficult made simple
I bought the book Friday, started to read it that day (after work), continued the reading Saturday, and by Sunday evening I had ported almost the whole website for my workplace from Struts to Cocoon!
The book transforms a very complex subject to a comprehensible level, to the point that you will be Cocooning just after a few days like an expert!
My advice: GET THE BOOK!
RCS
Rating: -
A practical, detailed guide
Cocoon is one of the showpieces of the Apache XML project. It is a powerful framework that allows developers to more efficiently set up, create, and maintain sophisticated Web-oriented applications. Cocoon has attracted widespread attention because it solves a substantial problem for Web developers. Yet Cocoon's reliance on a wide array of open source technologies and standards makes it very complex. And, unlike some other open source technologies, Cocoon's online documentation is sparse and inadequate. Lajos Moczar's Cocoon Developer's Handbook is a practical, detailed guide for intermediate to advanced level developers who need to learn how to implement the Cocoon framework in a Web XML publishing system. Cocoon Developer's Handbook is not a theoretical work about XSL, XSP, and XSLT standards, but rather a hands-on explanation of these technologies within the Cocoon framework, with examples and solutions to get developers up and running with Cocoon.
Rating: 
-
Good book to get started
I found this book to be a great help for getting started with
the cocoon webpublishing framework. It is much easier to
understand and better structured than the documentation on cocoon.apache.org.
The only thing I didn't like is that some chapters promise information
that they don't provide. E.g. there's a "chapter" about writing a custom
transformer component, that I saw in the table of content and was eager
to read. It turns out that this is just half of a page explaining that the
author wil NOT discuss custom transformers. Also some other chapters
that scratch the surface of some advanced/complex topics lack the depths that I hoped for in a 700 page book.
But nevertheless the book is worth its money and I would recommend it
to anyone who plans his first cocoon project.
Rating: -
A great tool to become used to Cocoon.
Besides the necessary introductory work (performed nevertheless in an organic and rational way) the book is a real "hands on" manual. Useful for most of real-world applications.
Chapter 16 on Databases saved me a long work to retrieve otherwise sparse informations from the net.
A great lecture for 'self-teachin night owls'.
Rating: -
Very well done
Cocoon is a Java-based open source XML content manager and publishing engine from the Apache project. This book was written as an introduction to Cocoon for the developer with a good background in XML and Java but with no background in Cocoon. Part I of the book is an introduction to Cocoon. I found this part of the book to be very difficult and confusing. There was a lot of writing on Generators, Transformers, and Serializers, but the overall discussion was hard to follow. Fortunately, this was only the first 65 pages of the book. Starting with Part II, the book takes on a whole new and much better flavor. After a chapter describing how to install Cocoon, the authors go right into some real examples of how to use Cocoon. Suddenly all the information from Part I which felt incomplete started making sense. The examples and sample code (which need to be downloaded) are excellent in explaining how to use Cocoon. This section goes through example after example, each demonstrating more of the functionality of Cocoon. All the examples worked exactly as advertised and were well designed to demonstrate the many capabilities of Cocoon. Part III of the book discusses advanced topics such as database connectivity, web services, and integrating Cocoon with EJBs. Part IV covers design factors, administration, etc. The last two parts of the book are reference tools. Overall, I though the authors did a good job of making Cocoon easy to understand.