Preview of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook, by Nick Haralabidis

This new post is an exception to the rule of commenting on  books I have read, or better studied even their code. Since the author is an old colleague and a friend of mine who has helped me in the past, I feel obliged to present his new book, which is currently in preparation. I am afraid I have not studied the whole text, the complete source code is though available; just read some parts of it. Furthermore, enduring for 2 days the second release of JDeveloper  11g was more than just enough for me. IDE XML editing  exceptions popping up all the time! Thus, one can certainly say that I am biased and my preview comments are not complete. I can surely live with that and if you can do so too, let us go on with the presentation!
The master chef who authored the recipes offers valuable advice and plenty of examples of source code, unlike other recently published ADF books who seem to target more to project managers; rather avoid exposing the reader to code. The step by step instructions are easy to follow and implement in your own project, saving you time and effort. Furthermore,  the text contains quite advanced techniques about refactoring, debugging, profiling, testing and optimizing, fine-tuning and monitoring  an ADF application. Such topics are not included even in ADF books written by Oracle stuff. Moreover ignorance of  them has been  in the past  the cause of hiring external consultants and spending all project contingency funds. Nevertheless, the text only mentions using business components as the model technology and not EJBs, neither facelets. Further details about the book one can find here.

Comments on Getting Started With Oracle BPM 11gR1 Suite, by Heidi Buelow, Manoj Das, Manas Deb, Prasen Palvankar, Meera Srinivasan

On the bright side the text is well written in American English. It is well organized, full of  helpful images of the older JDeveloper 11.1.1.2 version, tutorials and hands on practice. The setup instructions are accurate, detailed and the full source code is available online too. 
On the dark side, the text is full of marketing lecture, whole chapters of promoting the suite, using rather banal and boring expressions of the type: "best of breed software" and so on.  What is worse is that instead of warning the reader of potential hazards, which might risk a project's outcome, the authors seem to prefer to conceal the product defects.
Consider for example chapter 10. On page 254 it reads: "The next chapter provides instructions on running and testing the process." But what follows is Using Process Composer, neither running nor testing the application. What is more, a defect is hidden here: if one follows the relevant OTN online tutorials to proceed on his own, one hits on a bug, mentioned here. For  the JDeveloper 11.1.1.4 user the process becomes eventually visible in BPM Workspace in Application panel, only if one restarts the application server; which is rather unacceptable for production deployments.
All in all, the book offers a spherical hands on introduction to the BPMN suite, including ADF (sadly only business components, no EJB's) and other relevant technologies by insiders, that is oracle employees. However, a more pragmatic approach to acknowledging defects and providing workarounds, if possible, would be ideal! Furthermore,  a word about the myth of developing via the oracle SOA platform, without writing any Java code, which oracle marketing endorsed.  After all, Mr Piotr Bazan summarizes so right, what the man in the street thinks about it: "Have to say I've never worked with such buggy tools where every step brings a new problem." Isn't that the reasons that JDeveloper related jobs are so hard to find worldwide on the one hand, and the salaries offered  are way more than the average on the other?