Book Review: Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook

Yannick Ongena’s Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook is hands down the best practical WebCenter book out there covering the radically new features introduced by the 11g R1 Patch Set 3 version of the product. In 14 chapters it provides 100+ step-by-step recipes that help the reader through a wide variety of tasks, ranging from portal and portlet creation through content integration, all the way to security. The book covers many of the collaboration services of WebCenter as well, including discussions, wikis, polls, tagging, and search. If you’re interested in WebCenter Spaces, the book offers a dozen or so recipes including space creation, sub-space management, lists, as well as spaces life cycle.

As the most active and one of the most knowledgable members of the WebCenter community, Yannick writes in an accurate and easy to follow language. While the title of the book suggests that it was written more of as a cookbook that you turn to when you’re about to prepare a new “WebCenter dish”, it is an ideal reading for newcomers to learn the product. The book comes with the source code of the samples.

While overall very impressed by the book, one minor complaint: I find the word “Administration” somewhat confusing in the title. The book covers many-many aspects of the product, from the IDE-based development through runtime evolution of the portal, to administration. Let the title not mislead you: if you’re a WebCenter Portal developer, power user, or even business user, you’ll definitely enjoy the book too.

Thank you, Yannick, for putting this nice book together. And as far as the dishes are concerned, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of opportunities to make up for it… 😉