Written on January 28, 2009 by Stephan Schmidt

Micro Book Review: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta

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Title: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability
Author: Ari Zilka (Terracotta CTO) and his team
Pages: 368

What the book is about
The books is an introduction about Terracotta which helps you distribute -transparently- the Java Virtual Machine memory over several JVMs. The main part of “The Definitive Guide to Terracotta” focuses on use cases. Those are quite good motivated, explained and described with many examples and working code.

What I’ve learned from the book

What Terracotta and virtual heaps are
How to use TC with ehCache, Hibernate and for session clustering
Dropping in ready-to use functionality with TC integration modules (TIM) is easy

What I didn’t like

Chapter about optimizations but not extensive enough and not enough information about deployments and deployment scenarios.

Should you buy this book?
Yes, highly recommended, it’s written by the Terracotta guys, you can’t get better and more accurate information.

Who should buy the book

Every developer or architect who wants to use or evaluate Terracotta

Notes
Book kindly supplied by the publisher. This is a short version of my former review

I’ve chosen the micro review format because it lends itself to be used as a future micor format and I like short reviews myself. You can read the table of contents elsewhere, I don’t like it when reviews iterate the content.

What do you think about this short review style?

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About the author: Stephan Schmidt is head of development at brands4friends. He has more than 15 years of internet technology experience and 10 years experience in agile. He was head of development, consultant and CTO and is a speaker, author and blog writer. He specializes in organizing and optimizing software development helping companies by increasing productivity with lean software development and agile methodologies. Want to know more? All views are only his own.

Comments

James Iry

January 28th, 2009

> What do you think about this short review style?

Feelings mixed.

stephan

January 28th, 2009

Why? Could you elaborate?

When I read review e.g. on slashdot I most often jump to the conclusion. When on Amazon I read one good review and several 1 star reviews to see if I like the product. The sort ones are enough for me (for the content I go to the table of content).

Would you like more cons/pros? More on the content?

James Iry

January 28th, 2009

Nope, can’t elaborate, that’s my nano review format for commenting on blogs. :-)

Actually it was a joke. I think it’s fine to omit chapter listings, especially if you link to the publisher’s page. More pros and cons are always good.

stephan

January 28th, 2009

“[...] that’s my nano review format for commenting on blogs.” Hehe.