jBPM developers guide review

Finally some time to do the review.

Let me start with my biggest discovery: the book is written about jBPM3 and not the newer jBPM4. This is not mentioned on the Packt publishing site. Too bad, a jBPM4 book is still missing in the offering.

Conclusion

PRO:

• Probably the best developers book about jBPM3 so far. Compared to BPM With JBoss jBPM, this book is aimed more for developers and goes further into the technical details.
• The book brings beginners to an advanced level. It does not bring advanced users to a further level.
• I would advice beginner jBPM developers to start with this book. It emphasizes on getting the basics right but does not hide the more advanced features.
• The explanation is good, providing context and sufficient examples.

CON:

• Their is definitely a language impedance for the writer. Sentence are basic, language constructs are poor and almost all the sentences start with “You’ll see” or “You will”. Very sad to see this poor editorial from Packt Publishing. Clearly no review by them, and I blame them and not the writer.
• Some content is noble, but also beyond the goal of this book. Chapters 1 & 2 are not interesting to jBPM Developers. They cover a motivational speech about why you should care for open source, what is BPM and how to create your own BPM engine.
• Some must have advanced topics are missing: integration with test frameworks, exception handling for example.

As stated, I do recommend this book for new jBPM developers since it does provide a rather good learning curve for new developers. Don’t expect this book to be a reference, therefore it is much to verbose and not advanced enough. The userguide of jBPM is a better reference.

Kind regards,
Andries