Comments on Teach yourself JavaScript in 24 hours by Michael Moncur, 4rth Edition

On the bright side, the text is clear, well structured without any spelling errors. Its chapters are structured in such a tidy and concise way, so that its title actually corresponds to its content exactly; a series of timed tutorial lessons, a do it yourself learning course. Each chapter has its questions and answers sections, quiz questions and relevant answers and finally exercises. Its source code is complete and available. The lesson about debugging, DOM and forms validation is valuable as a reference.
On the dark side, the reader has to know  beforehand, some programming essentials,  since the text does not analytically present some subjects in great length and depth, i.e. some complained about the coverage of  loops.
All in all, the book is a success, now in its 4rth edition, offering an introductory course in JavaScript for experienced programmers. Moreover, it is very useful as a reference, offering a wealth of information in its appendixes: other JavaScript resources, tools etc.

Comments on Oracle Application Server 10g: J2EE Deployment and Administration, by Michael Wessler, Erin Mulder, Rob Harrop, Jan Machacek, Apress

On the bright side, the text is very well organized, tight, well written, without spelling errors. It describes  thoroughly all the options available in each screen shot. There are also some tips and  hints about performance tuning, such as using web cache. Its source code is available online as well.
On the dark side, the text resembles more of a manual than a learning course. It has no tutorials, nor end of chapter step by step exercises for the reader to implement on his own, in order i.e. to actually measure any performance gains. The book was published back in 2004 and I quote an interesting paragraph of its presentation text, which can be found at: http://apress.com/book/view/9781590592359
"Oracle Application Server 10g: J2EE Deployment and Administration focuses on the latest version of Oracle's fully J2EE-certified application server (previously called Oracle9iAS). Oracle Corp. is aggressively attacking this market with a new lost-cost version of the server, as well as a program to move BEA customers onto Oracle free of charge. Adoption interest is growing rapidly amidst favorable reports regarding performance and reliability."
All in all, the book might be of use to web administrators with old J2EE 1.3, already running servers. Today, its content is mostly deprecated, as OAS end of life is approaching.

JDeveloper 10g: Deployment of JHeadstart application to OAS 10.1.2

A common demand by customers in the public sector, is keeping their usually many years old, existing application server installations intact and rarely upgrade to newer versions. Others say that buying new hardware is far too expensive. Sometimes compatibility reasons, i.e. simultaneous use of older Oracle forms applications, tie you up. Furthermore, why should one mess up a smoothly up and running   1.3 JEE application server, after all?
Developer's nightmare
The sad thing is that customers usually inform you of such requirements, only when you have already finished testing at the current version of the J2EE container of the Oracle Application Server or OAS, the one embedded in JDeveloper (that is in our case: 10.1.3) and the contemporary stand alone J2EE 1.4 OC4J instance!

Whatever the extra cost of effort, time and money, the developer is to conform to the customer rules. The integrated scope changes control process mentioned in the Project Management Body of Knowledge are vastly considered purely theoretical in Greek software houses. In practice, the competition is very hard, no manager can afford a displeased customer. On the other hand, bear in mind that plain programmers are dispensable. I only wonder what are the working conditions abroad? Please respond, with as many details as possible!
So, if you are finally stuck to the older version of OAS, you might consult a brief deployment guide to a test server at :
http://code.google.com/p/nickaiva-blogspot/downloads/detail?name=DeployToOAS_v2.pdf&can=2&q=
Perhaps reading it, might save you some time and frustration...

Further critical references concerning ADF:

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