Liferay in Action

As a part of preparation for the Liferay Certified Professional Developer exam, I read this book about Liferay. Liferay is a Java based open source portal project, which offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers.

The book Liferay in Action was authored by Richard Sezov Jr, Liferays Knowledge Manager and author of the Liferay Portal Administrator’s Guide. He also leads the team, which is responsible for the documentation and training materials. The book is mentioned as the official guide for building Liferay applications. The actual edition of the book covers Liferay version 6.1. That’s not the newest available version, but there were no fundamental changes concerning the concepts and the best practices of plugins development in version 6.2. The book addresses to Java developers with basic knowledge in web technologies. Experience with Liferay or with the Portlet API is not required.

The book starts with an introduction to Liferay and a manual for setting up the development environment, whit a good description of each step. The rest of the book deals with the different plugin types, which can be developed for Liferay. For each plugin type there is a separate chapters, where the plugins and its purposes are explained in a practical example use case. These examples gives the reader an overview of the most important features and plugins Liferay offers. The explanations always contain the important parts of the source code. Sometimes the snippets aren’t sufficient. In such cases the whole source code helps, which is downloadable under: http://www.manning.com/sezov/. On the whole, the book gives you a very good overview over all important parts of Liferay. What is particularly noticeable is the good structure, the book follows. It begins on a basic level and then gets more detailed. The parts of the book, which are quite exhausting to read, are peppered by some loosening sentences of the author. These sections make the exhausting parts easier to read.

It seems like the author tried to not clutter up the chapters with too much code snippets and extractions of configuration files, but sometimes there are not all necessary information about the code printed in the book. In such cases I was lucky to have the complete source code of the example project available. If you prepare for the Liferay Certified Professional Developer exam as well, if you want to get introduced to Liferay or if you want to expand your knowledge about Liferay I can only recommend this book to you.

This blog post is as well available on mimacom blog