On the bright side the text is well written without many misspellings. It has a tutorial format which is easy to follow, starting from chapter 9. The source code available from www.tuhra.com is compatible with all 10g versions of JDeveloper starting from 10.1.3, so that you can build the application presented, from scratch. Moreover, some use cases mentioned in chapter 15 are very useful and can be reusable in many similar user requirements.
On the dark side, the chapters up to 9 are a bore, purely theoretical. The 8th chapter, about bindings is tedious to read and not easy at all to understand. In addition, some jsp pages are missing from the whole application, such as the jobs.jsp and the help page. Apart from that, in page 329, there is a screen shot of an application page called reference.jsp, presenting a dynamic menu tree layout, which is very difficult to create on your own, via plain ADF. This highlight page is actually missing from the code too, as mentioned in the following link:
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2022769�
Apparently, the application page screen shot was created using JHeadstart, and not purely ADF. JHeadstart is an extension for JDeveloper which must be paid for. Furthermore, the whole chapter, 16, which is devoted to demonstrating, or rather promoting, JHeadstart is totally useless for the individual, open source developer. It could have been replaced by a more useful deployment guide to the Oracle Application Server (OAS) instead.
All in all, the book is not recommended unless you are forced to implement for an older J2EE environment. Besides, at the time of this writing the OAS, and JDeveloper 10g is being deprecated, its end of life is approaching and there is always a free online tutorial, if you still need to get started.
Further critical references concerning ADF:
Tales from the trenches by Dr. Dorsey. Coauthor of the JDeveloper 10g hanbook.
