I got my hands on a copy of the new book "Developing Web Application with Oracle ADF Essentials" by Sten Vesterli published by Packt Publishing, so I wanted to post a quick review.
There are already multiple books about Oracle ADF out there, but the unique angle for this book is that it focuses on the free version of Oracle ADF - Oracle ADF Essentials. To increase the "Free" angle it also uses the free MySQL database throughout the book which is a nice touch that differs from the regular approach of using an Oracle database.
The book is around 250 pages long and as such it is not aiming for a very deep technical dive, but rather gives a very good overview of the various layers of ADF Essentials to someone who is new to the world of ADF. It covers the Fusion stack including ADF BC, ADF Faces, ADF Controller and ADF Binding. Going beyond the wizards it also covers the basics of adding code in managed beans and the business components layer.
The book starts with setting up your environment including JDev+MySQL and GlassFish, and then uses this environment to build a simple application that you enhance and add features to while going through the various chapters of the book.
Considering the target audience for ADF Essentials (Java purists), it might have been interesting to include in the book a chapter that describe integration with EJBs and POJOs as a source of data for ADF applications. I guess this is something for the next edition...
The book does address establishing a security layer for your ADF Essentials application - something that you get in regular ADF but you need to manually implement in the Essentials packaging.
Sten also goes beyond the basic intro level to cover some of the topics he also covered in his other book about enterprise ADF Development. He includes chapters about debugging, deployment and library usage and also addresses team development - which is a nice touch.
Overall the book can provide a great introduction to ADF for a developer who is completely new to the framework. The fact that is uses a completely free stack should make it even more attractive. For developers who are looking to leverage the free version of ADF this is right now the only book out there to cover that part of the framework (Glassfish configuration etc).
After you read this book, you'll probably want to dig deeper with some of the more in-depth books about ADF to complete the picture.