Jess in Action

[Thomas Paul]

I just got my copy of Ernest's book in the mail yesterday. I read the first two chapters last night. Very good so far. Ernest has a nice, easy writing style. It's more like someone talking to you than you get in a lot of technical books. Good job, Ernest!

[Thomas Paul]

I like the cover too. The colors are very soft on the eye.
This was actually to bounce this topic back to the top.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Thanks! I'm really glad to hear that people are starting to get paper copies of the book -- there was some unexplained holdup with Amazon actually shipping it.
I hope I can persuade you to exercise your "Top Reviewer" status on my behalf once you've read it through

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
I hope I can persuade you to exercise your "Top Reviewer" status on my behalf once you've read it through

I think it would be very difficult to stop me from writing a review.

[Jason Menard]

I've been interested in taking a look at this book from the time I saw it pop up on Manning's page. I was going to request it for review but I think it was Michael Ernest who beat me to it. I'm not too familiar with the topic, but the little I have read on it was enough to make me want to find out more. This is one I will definitely have to check out at some point.
--------------------
Top 52000 Amazon Reviewer
[ August 02, 2003: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

[Andres Gonzalez]

Jason, your link to amazon has 0 reviews, are you trying to compete with Thomas ?
[ August 03, 2003: Message edited by: Andres Gonzalez ]

[Axel Janssen]

In the wish list he actually beats Thomas 27 : 24.

[Jason Menard]

Originally posted by Andres Gonzalez:
Jason, your link to amazon has 0 reviews, are you trying to compete with Thomas ?
[ August 03, 2003: Message edited by: Andres Gonzalez ]

Hmm... I think that part of Amazon must be down right now.

Originally posted by Axel Janssen:
In the wish list he actually beats Thomas 27 : 24

Well I did, until you reminded me and then I went and cleaned it up a bit. Does anyone else use the wishlist like I do? As a place just to note things you find while browsing Amazon that you may wish to buy at a later date? It serves as a reminder to me, so i don't forget for example exactly which book in a certan category I was interested in buying. I suppose I should go and add "Jess in Action" to it.
[ August 03, 2003: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Jason Menard:
Does anyone else use the wishlist like I do? As a place just to note things you find while browsing Amazon that you may wish to buy at a later date?

I use it as a place so the publishers can figure out what to bribe me with to get good reviews. Unfortunately none of them have taken the hint yet!

[Andres Gonzalez]

I have my wishlist, and send it to all my relatives few days before my birthday

[Jason Menard]

Does anyone know of any good introductory expert systems books that might serve as a good primer before jumping into Jess in Action?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I like to think that J.I.A. can stand alone; it really doesn't assume you have any background in rule-based systems. I also happen to know that if you start reading it and have any questions, you won't have any trouble finding answers to them at JavaRanch...
If you do find, though, that you need to get some background first, there are really a dearth of other practical books about rule-based programming. Peter Jackson's book is usually considered the canonical reference, but it's pretty dry and academic. Giarratano and Riley's massive (and expensive) tome spends more than half of its length explaining unrelated things like the waterfall model of software development; in the second half it does spend a few chapters doing a basic tutorial in the CLIPS rule language but the examples are trivial and not realistic.

[Thomas Paul]

I finished JIA and will be posting the review soon. And I finished Joe's book too. In fact, I have six books sitting on my desk waiting to be reviewed. I an not going to tell you whether I liked them or not yet. You will have to wait for the review. But I will tell you that out of the six books, neither one of you wrote my favorite. This was my favorite:
In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
by Merrill R. Chapman

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Sounds like a really fun read. The cover picture is priceless!

[Mapraputa Is]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:
I like to think that J.I.A. can stand alone; it really doesn't assume you have any background in rule-based systems.

Jason is asking, because he is preparing a list of questiond to ask during book giveaway to win the book.

Originally posted by Jason Menard:
I've been interested in taking a look at this book from the time I saw it pop up on Manning's page. I was going to request it for review but I think it was Michael Ernest who beat me to it.

... and at least three more people besides you (these are I know about). Hey, Tom, how about two giveaways?

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Mapraputa Is:
... and at least three more people besides you (these are I know about). Hey, Tom, how about two giveaways?

Maybe we should run a giveaway in MO!

[Mapraputa Is]

Now that's a good idea!

[Michael Ernest]

My review of JIA should be up by morning. I'm allowing myself a few more pages of _Goblet of Fire_ first. Also, because I can't have Thomas Paul thinking he's better than me, I'll have my bit on In Search of Stupidity done pretty soon too.
Also on the near horizon:
Practical J2EE Application Architecture (the book that beat Mark Spritzler to a bloody pulp!) and Tomcat: The Definitive Guide
Other exciting products coming soon from the exciting Desk of Michael Ernest!
LDAP: Programming, Management & Integration (I ended up with 2 copies -- who wants one?)

[Jason Menard]

Originally posted by Michael Ernest:
LDAP: Programming, Management & Integration (I ended up with 2 copies -- who wants one?)

I could use it if you're offering.

[Bert Bates]

Ernest -
Your book is on my list! I worked with expert systems for years (I was a top TIRS developer :roll: ), talk about a big fish in a half dried up puddle . Anyway, Kathy and I are both very excited about the return of expert systems! (She did her stint too.)
I actually wrote a simple expert system engine last winter. We were going to have it be a project in the Head First book, but it didn't quite make the cut. I spent a lot of time teaching clients how to use expert systems, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how you went about teaching this topic... kind of envious you got there first!
-Bert

[Thomas Paul]

Finally, here is my review:
Jess is a rule engine written in Java. This book is not about rules engines, although it does have a brief introduction to rules engines. This book is about Jess. In fact, this book is the book on Jess. If you are interested in learning what kind of problems Jess can be used to solve and how to use Jess to solve these problems then this book will answer your questions.
The book is basically divided into two sections. The first section is a tutorial on Jess. This section starts by showing how to install and configure Jess. The rest of this section covers the Jess syntax and demonstrates how to write rules for Jess. The tutorial is clearly written with some simple examples that do a good job of helping to make Jess understandable. The tutorial even shows how to do some optimizations for the rules that you write.
The rest of the book covers some fairly complicated applications written using Jess. The author refers to this section as a cookbook and the examples are complex enough and explained so well that it could easily serve this purpose. The best part of this section is that it will help someone who isn't familiar with rules engines develop ideas about how they might implement a rules engine to solve their own business requirements. The examples themselves cover integrating Jess with Java both in typical client based applications and J2EE web based applications.
If you are interested in using Jess as a possible solution to your business needs then this book is a virtual necessity. I couldn't imagine trying to use Jess without this book.

[Pauline McNamara]

Welcome to JavaRanch Thomas Paul! We strongly discourage duplicate posts, please choose one appropriate forum for your contribution, and link to that from other forums if necessary. Javaranchers who post duplicates in multiple forums will be punished with book deprivation for 4 weeks, posting amazon reviews will be blocked for 3 months, then their keyboard will be configured to the standard finnish layout for the number of days equal to amazon reviews they have written. Thanks for posting and hope you'll be visiting the ranch often!

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Pauline McNamara:
Welcome to JavaRanch Thomas Paul! We strongly discourage duplicate posts...

I plead not guitly. I posted here first and then some person by the name of "Book Review Team" copied my post practically word for word and posted it in that other forum. Clearly, that "Book Review Team" besides having a highly dubious name is a plagiarist!


[ August 30, 2003: Message edited by: Thomas Paul ]

[Thomas Paul]

Finally, amazon posted the review. Looks like the posted a whole bunch all at once.