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… 😉

Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook Available

The WebCenter 11g Handbook: Build Rich, Customizable Enterprise 2.0 Applications is now available in online stores and possibly in your nearest book store too.

If you are evaluating the WebCenter Framework, Social Computing Services, or are simply curious what WebCenter is all about – flipping through the book is a pretty time and cost effective way of getting the big picture. If you are using WebCenter, there are a lot of samples that walk you through the capabilities.

Here is some extra information that may help you decide if this is the right book for you. The high level table of contents is at the bottom of the post, and here is the detailed TOC. This is a podcast (mp3), published by McGraw Hill about the book. And here is a sample chapter from a snap shot taken shortly before the book went to print, so it’s very close to the actual one in the book: Chapter 11 – Runtime Customization.

Table of contents

Part I: Introduction to Oracle WebCenter and the Application Development Framework
Chapter 1. Business Application Development: The Journey to WebCenter
Chapter 2. The WebCenter Development Environment
Chapter 3. Oracle Application Development Framework
Part II: Building WebCenter Applications
Chapter 4. Building Your First WebCenter Page
Chapter 5. Consuming and Building Portlets
Chapter 6. Inter-component Communication
Chapter 7. Integrating Content Systems
Chapter 8. Overview of WebCenter Web 2.0 Services
Chapter 9. Social Web 2.0 Services–New Concepts in the Application Landscape
Chapter 10. Setting Up Your Development Environment for Success
Part III: Tailoring Your Applications
Chapter 11. Run-Time Customization
Chapter 12. Resource Catalog
Chapter 13. Skinning Your WebCenter Applications
Chapter 14. Metadata Services Framework
Chapter 15. Extending Oracle Composer
Chapter 16. MDS Under the Hood of WebCenter
Part IV: Administering Your Applications
Chapter 17. Installing and Managing WebCenter
Chapter 18. Security
Chapter 19. Deployment
Part V: Oracle Applications Integration
Chapter 20. Extending Oracle Applications with WebCenter
Chapter 21. Looking to the Future with WebCenter and Fusion Applications

Free WebCenter Book

I’m giving away three copies of the Oracle WebCenter 11g Handbook to the top 3 bloggers/tweeters about Oracle WebCenter during Oracle OpenWorld 2009 (Oct 11-15).

To be considered for the price, all you need to do is post a link to your blog and/or twitter name here as a comment.

The book is scheduled to be released in December 2009. I will announce the winners here and contact them in person to discuss shipping information.