ActiveMQ in Action

This book may be useful for a sysadmin, who want to configure ActiveMQ. Also positive is that this book does not spend half of its pages on marketing. The authors seem knowledgeable, but they seem to be not willing to share their knowledge too much.One cannot configure something without understanding why they configure that. In other words, it is necessary to understand the ideas behind the configuration. This part is not so good in this book. Authors spend lot of pages printing the console outputs of the running programs, but when it comes to explaining the ideas, they clearly try to save space. Explanations are short and unclear. Maybe other books are even worse, and I am too picky. But the main result of this reading was that I felt that I need other books to read.

Underneath every major operating system lies the ability to communicate messages between applications using services. Messages occur in several forms and contain a number of data types. This makes it possible to communicate almost any possible kind of message between applications. This book details the Java based messaging system based on the JMS 1.1 specification.Linux messaging proved to be a highly useful operation which was brought into Windows from Linux and had its features expanded to include an expanded range of message types along with authentication and local receivers. The Windows operating systems began using messaging services in the mid 90s. Active Message Queuing is a further advance of the design translated from C++ to Java when it was implemented on Linux. It retains many of the major Windows features while eliminating much of the confusing usage that plagued Windows messaging."ActiveMQ in Action" does a superlative job of explaining the use of this highly complex and somewhat subtle service. I can testify that it does a much better job of explaining than the Microsoft documentation and reference books do in explaining their Messaging. I have literally spent hundreds of hours trying to get Windows Messaging to make enough sense to get database interfaces to work using it. This book will save you all that wasted time. It is very well organized and presents a thorough picture of Message Queuing practices and operations.So, you want to design a complex and flexible Linux Messaging service. And you want enterprise as well as local receivers. Then this is the book for you. Especially if your application clients are written in Java and ultimate performance is not the issue, then you have found the right source for your solution. So, what are you waiting for?

After reading this book almost from cover to cover (except for chapters 8 and 9) and trying out all source code, I have come to the conclusion that this is a decent book all in all and it's definitely worth a read if you are using ActiveMQ (unless you are an advanced user already). It appears that most of what's in the book is more or less online on the ActiveMQ site (in fact, the example code looks alike in a lot of places), so you may not necessarily need to buy it unless you want to. For me, I always find it helpful to have a paper copy around so that I can peruse it even when I'm not online. Some of the example code in the book won't work out of the box but you can usually figure it out what's wrong with it and fix it yourself or a simple web search will provide you an answer most of the time. For example, in one example, an environment variable is referenced in ActiveMQ configuration files but it's not set automatically and you should remember to set them before executing the code. Example on SSL connector requires more configuration than what's in the book. The last example code in chapter 13 doesn't give better performance but if you set another property that's not listed in the code, it will work as expected.The first few chapters in part 1 provide a pretty good overview of JMS and its features - these are very helpful to novices. Most of the material in part 2 should be easy to pick up for someone who has used any messaging technology at some point in their careers. Part 3 is useful for integration with application servers or for using ActiveMQ with a language other than Java for client consumption. Part 4, Advanced Features, is the most helpful section in the book for me. It covers enterprise deployment, tuning, administration and monitoring - I have used several ideas outlined in these chapters with pretty good results in my current work place.Note that this book was written with ActiveMQ version 5.4. I have used ActiveMQ 5.7 to test all sample code and at the time of this writing, the latest version is 5.8.

Just finished this book. Message brokers like WS-MQ, Tibco are quite expensive and require professional administrators. ActiveMQ is just a single jar file you can invoke from Eclipse. But don't be misled. It is a full fledged, high performance message broker. Learning message oriented middleware has two facets. The first is learning JMS. This book is not the best place to start. I would recommend  Java Message Service  which by happenstance uses ActiveMQ for its code samples.The other part is all the stuff that JMS doesn't deal with by design, such as fail over, clustering, performance tuning etc. That is specific to the broker. ActiveMQ makes all this ridiculously simple and comes with boatloads of features. This is an excellent book to learn all that.The reason I give it 4 instead of 5 starts is the code samples. Some of the stuff in some chapters is just missing. Also in keeping with all Manning books it uses Maven. But what if you don't like or use Maven? Still you don't have to use Maven. You can try it in your IDE.All in all if you looking to learn JMS or want an open source message broker ActiveMQ is a good choice and this book will be indispensable to you.

This is a great resource for ActiveMQ. I'm an admin for a large company who is migrating to Open Source Messaging. This book has lots of great tips & helpful explanation about activeMQ. I ordered the hardbound edition even though I can read it in Safari-Books. Great reference

I recommend this book to everyone who considers employing ActiveMQ as a messaging platform. The book covers messaging as such, JMS, setting up and running ActiveMQ, and other interesting areas (performance, high availability etc.).Useful for software architects and developers.

Good book, gets you up and running in no time.

Very quickly helps you make the ball rolling as it gradually gains altitude and leads you to best practices and high availability.Please do note that this is just ActiveMQ. FuseSource uses ActiveMQ and deplopys it on Karaf to add OSGI goodies combined with the power of Fabrik for centralized management and all.So take this for learning the basics and then use Fuse A-MQ documentation for real work.

I have not found the codes inside the book to get the PDF version.There are also errors in printing, so I have contacted Manning Publications to notify my problems.This is the response from Manning:I am sorry to inform you but books that are foreign translations are not officially published by Manning Publications and therefore are not eligible for the free ebook.Manning Support