Which book would you recommend for a Weblogic sysadmin?

Question

Apart from the BEA docs?

Answer 1

Err...How to Win Friends and Influence People? :-)

Honestly, a lot of this Enterprise Java stuff appears to have been designed to be extremely configurable by sysadmins so that the developer can pass off the blame for not getting it right to some guy "production engineer" whom they claim should have edited the XML files correctly. (I speak as a long-time developer and longer-time sysadmin; let's just say that these days all my developers are responsible for making sure that their sh*t gets rolled out correctly, and survives in production.)

So this is not exactly the answer you were looking for, in terms of listing books, but get to know your developers and your customers very well. Drinking together well. It will save you boatloads of misery.

And then, well, The Java Programming Language is a good start. If you can do sysadmin, there's a pretty decent chance you can learn to program. And you'll turn in to a boon to all the rest of the sysadmins out there, in that you'll actually be thinking about not just how to get some application passing tests, but also how to get it deployable with only reasonable effort.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, there's no good recent books for WebLogic administration. The Bea/Oracle J2EE admin space in general suffers from a dearth of good technical books aimed at administrators.

The admin docs for WebLogic server are pretty good, but they assume a working knowledge of J2EE.

To supplement the docs, If you're just getting started with J2EE administration, be sure to familiarize yourself with the core technologies of J2EE. JMS,JDBC, etc.

This doc is aimed at devs, but you can get a lot out of it as an admin. You'll find the J2EE world in general is highly developer centric. You really can't be a good J2EE admin without learning at least a tiny bit of Java.

As an admin, it is critical that you have a good understanding of the Java package structure. Unless you have the pleasure of working with a better than average team, the devs will give you broken packages to deploy.

When you tell them the package is broken, they will blame "your configuration". After all, it "works on my box" You will have to open up the j/e/war and diagnose the problem yourself. About half the time, the deployment descriptor will have some problem. The other half of the time, libraries will be missing from the package, or the package will contain versions of opensource libraries that conflict with the version WebLogic uses. Occasionally, the problem will actually be "your configuration"

http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Authoring/Building-and-Deploying-an-EAR/ http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/programming/concepts.html#1050656

You should know ant backwards and forwards. The O'Reilly Ant book is good.

WLST is vital. You'll get more out of it if you know some Python.

Answer 3

Moby-Disk. Brillant work.

Maybe you could narrow it down just a bit? Java book? Administration book?