Hello Dan,
I've been working with Seam since 6 month or so, and read a couple of books in between. I can clearly say that SIA is by far the best book on the market (at least the best among those I'm aware of). You manage to find the balance between providing enough information to interesting topics, but not loosing the general direction in long side excursions. Really good work.
Two things I have to say
- I tried to work with the examples, but without success so far. I will continue where I stopped the other day, and I'm sure that I'll succeed finally. But my impression was that the information on how to work with what (concerning the examples) is unnecessarily spread out over a couple of documents (the book, various readme.txt, the build file itself and more), making it not as easy at it could be for the reader.
- although i honor the approach to provide a consistent example domain throughout the book,
you should know that 'golf' is a pretty uncommon sport in central europe. but we all try to twist our heads around tee-sets, clubs and caddies. ;-)
dont't take the last point too serious.
coming back to the subject of my posting:
I liked (and used) javaranch very much when i got java-certified. but later on i pretty much gave up the forum, one of the reasons is that i'm unable to find forum threads where 'interesing' subjects are manifesting. seam is a good example,
JEE development and spring are others.
i ran a full text search against the starting page where the forum topics are listed, did not find "seam" and ended up with some trivial postings under "JBoss".one thing i would recommend is to open an own seam forum. another thing to refactor the strucure of the splash page. add at least "seam" in the description of this forum...
(relativly) simple gadgets like activity-meters or tag clouds could draw the visitors attention in the right direction... and if some forums would be merged to work out a more JEE orientated structure (among other aspects, of course), we all would win.
just my two cents,
best wishes from Berlin, Germany,
Jan
[ October 08, 2008: Message edited by: Jan Groth ]