ActiveMQ in Action (MEAP) - Book Review

One Minute Bottom Line

Review

Chapters in my MEAP version: 

1. An Introduction to Messaging and ActiveMQ
2. How to Configure ActiveMQ
3. Using ActiveMQ to Build Messaging Applications
4. Advanced Features in ActiveMQ

What I liked:

• There were tons of valuable images that did an excellent job of complementing the authors' ideas.
• The authors explained their theory well and gave an excellent introduction. 
• They gave an excellent explanation of why and when to use ActiveMQ.
• How to work with other java tools, like maven and ant, was also discussed.
• The book had a good amount of Java code and XML configuration for ActiveMQ.
• It had a good amount of output results in console or terminal to give you a clear idea of what to expect when you run the samples.
• It didn't isolate you to only working with Java. Instead, it allowed you to work with many other programming languages like C#, C++, PHP,Ruby, Perl and Phyton, even REST and Ajax.
• It included some case studies.
• It gave good material on Administration, Security, Tuning and Monitoring for ActiveMQ.
• There was also coverage on working with many Application servers like Tomcat, Jetty, Apache Geronimo and JBoss.
• It even discussed working with the Spring Framework!

What I disliked:

• In MEAP format, it did not have all the code and snippets available.
• It also did not include the classic Manning approach of including circled numbers and then proceeding to explain each important part.
• All the code is tested by commands, so there is not a clear interaction between the user and the application by GUI.
• There were not enough images showing how to work with the ActiveMQ Web Console.

How to improve:

My three "disliked" reasons would be resolved if this book included the complete code to give the complete panorama.

This is a shortened version of my review. To see an extended review that adds a chapter-by-chapter summary of topics, click here.