Hi Mark,
Yes; this book has been designed to take somebody who knows
Java web development and turn them into a Liferay developer.
In fact, during development of the book, Manning thought I was going too slow and had me move some material into appendixes in order to get going with development faster. So some background information about portlets and IDEs and such now appears in appendices.
I wanted to cover several frameworks in the book (Spring,
JSF, etc.), but I wasn't able to get to that material, and so I stuck with Liferay's MVCPortlet framework. This is really nice and easy to use, because it uses conventions rather than XML config files or annotations. So once you learn the conventions, you know how it works, and then everything works in the same
pattern.
Hope this helps!
--Rich