Comments on Heads first Servlets&Jsp 2nd Edition

On the bright side, the book is written in an unusual way, full of graphics and photos of an oriental martial arts movie, in an attempt to make reading the text, seem like fun. The book is full of exercises and questions to help the reader to memorize whatever is important for passing the exams. The text is clear, easy to understand most of the times, with the exceptions of the chapter about patterns and custom tag development. There also many typographical errors in the text and the questions as well. One should consult the huge error page at O'Reilly.
On the dark side, there is no hands on coding practice, the examples mentioned are deliberately simple, about cats and dogs, or outdated (struts) so that you can not easily reuse any source code from the book. This is no reference book either, as stated by its authors.
All in all, the book prepares you well for the Sun J2EE 1.4 exams, servlet v2.4, jsp v2.0, in a straightforward and funny way, but it certainly needed a greater update on older themes and addition of newer, such as jsf.

Comments on Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite11g, Heidi Buelow Manas Deb Jayaram Kasi Demed L'Her Prasen Palvankar

On the bright side, the text is very well written with so few spelling errors. Its tutorial form guides the reader smoothly, one step at a time. The majority of the chapters are short and concrete, the text is easy to understand and to follow, most of the times. It surely serves the reader well, as a hands on introduction, without getting deep into details. Its source code works!
On the dark side, the installation chapter, 4, needs some additions, clarifications and updates, since the newer versions always need patching and so on. The download links from o.t.n. also need an update. An inexperienced reader might spend a considerable amount of time and effort to get the SOA suite servers up and running. These two links could offer some significant help: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=4210625&#4210625 and http://www.packtpub.com/article/installation-configuration-oracle-soa-suite-11g-1
All in all, the book offers a clear introduction in SOA and is recommended as a primer for newcomers to the SOA 11g world. An experienced soa 11g user might consider the book superficial, as no mention is made of advanced subjects, such as creating XML schema and reusing it.

Comments on Oracle JDeveloper 11g Handbook, by D.Mills, P.Koletzke, A, R. Faderman

On the bright side, the text is well written with few spelling errors and a whole new chapter about deployment to the new standalone Weblogic server. Such a chapter did not exist in the older book for JDeveloper 10g. In addition, there is more information about using version control in JDev11g.
Its tutorial form beginning at chapter 16, is easy to follow, in order to create a complete application for your practice. Its structure resembles the step by step, successful training methodology providing end of chapter source code solutions, as used in Oracle University classes. Such hands on practice is not present in the newer "Fusion Developer's guide" by F.Nimphius et al. Furthermore, the full source code was available for download, as well as a dedicated forum for discussions of issues.
On the dark side, the source code and application were developed with an older version of JDeveloper 11g, some text about tags, labels etc, especially in chapter 21 about security, were not present in the newer versions. Thus, if you attempt to build yourself the application from scratch in the newer JDeveloper version 11.1.1.2.0, as I tried, you shall need a great deal of patience, since there were incompatibilities and bugs found, as mentioned further in the link: http://www.tuhra.com/ where you are to sign in with OTN, and publicly at http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1030502 .
Moreover, the text of chapters before 16 is tedious to read, as several chapters are rather theoretical. Taskflows surely deserved a more practical approach and a do it your self add on, such as the hands on work by S.Muench, provided with his articles in Oracle magazine. There is no mention for alternative model technologies, such as JPA, EJB or POJOS throughout the book.
All in all, the book was well written and the source code given complete, as of the date of the release of JDeveloper version 11.1.1.1.0. Since then, a lot seems to have changed, older code has gone stale and a book published in December 2009 has been deprecated in only a number of months! Nonetheless, it  certainly remains still the best option for the beginners, for the time being. I am actually looking forward to a new edition, or even a reprint of the book, correcting all known errata and issues. 

Further critical references concerning ADF:

Tales from the trenches by Dr. Dorsey. Coauthor of JDeveloper 10g handbook.

Performance and scalability criticism  by several authors