I am avid reader and I have made it a practice to learn from reading. Most of what I have learnt today has been from my discontinued reading. Working on Oracle Fusion Middleware and SOA related technologies, I felt the need to educate myself on Oracle BPM and its concepts, for starters. I was reading the Oracle’s documentation of BPM, when I was contacted by Packt Publishing asking my opinion on the book titled Getting Started with Oracle BPMSuite 11gR1 – A Hands-On Tutorial.
Reading the book has indeed been a fulfilling experience for me. The book is simple, neat and well organized and it is worth mentioning that, this is a perfect book to start with, for learning Oracle BPM. The book throws light on the basics of BPM and hence caters to readers who are completely new to BPM making the reading experience worth one’s effort.
The book has been organized to cover BPM in a nutshell, yet very effectively. It explains in detail the entire product lifecycle encompassing product installation, product overview, product components in detail, samples and even the product administration. This will serve as a handbook which one can use to refer to any part during their busy schedule, as this book, in each chapter provides precise and right amount of information needed to make use of the product/component.
Having read the book for more than a couple of months, I particularly like the way the author has structured the flow of the book. It starts with introducing the BPM, its evolution and where BPM fits in a SOA. It adds more by explaining a process based application with mention on roles in the BPM projects.
The book then concentrates on Product Management, describing briefly the architecture, process analytics and features of the BPM product. The Functional overview covers key features of Oracle BPM Suite 11g.
Having introduced the fundamentals of BPM with relevant example, the author has by now ensured that the reader is made well aware of the basic concepts of BPM. The book then takes us through the complete installation process of Oracle BPM Suite 11g. It elaborates all installation steps right from creating schemas, configuring WLS, installing BPM with SOA already in place with attention to detail in every section. This makes installation, a learning experience and not a daunting task (as in most installations!). From my personal experience in working with product installations, I feel the author has paid acute attention even to the minute details in compiling this particular section on step-by-step process for installation of Oracle BPM Suite 11g. The installation steps, being the core to start learning BPM, has been dealt with brilliantly and definitely stands as one of the best reasons to own to the book.
The next couple of sections start to get practical, post installation of the product. These sections provide practical tutorials on application creation, role and participants’ definition and application set up. It also describes the procedure to run the application, once it has been set up.
The tutorials have been designed to facilitate readers to gain familiarity with the components of the BPM application. The sample application developed in the chapters so far however does not have any logic and that is when the next few sections kick in. These sections help one to add more logic by means of functionality to the application already being developed (by the reader). The use of Process Composer and BAM dashboards as added functionality, are also covered.
The book also covers individual components which when used in BPM applications, provide more functionality. The Oracle Business Rules and Human Tasks are well illustrated.
From the many books that I have read in the past on SOA, I have rarely seen books illustrating the non-functional aspects of a product. I was happy to find almost more than a couple of chapters covering the non functional aspect of the BPM.. These chapters have to be read slowly and in depth, to enable better understanding of the concepts covered. The events and exception handling play a role in almost all applications and these have to be mastered in order to create a robust and an efficient application.
The book also covers the administration of the BPM environment, although not in detail. The administration by itself is an area, where most books don’t venture much into and it is reasonable not to have added more to this section. Interested readers can find more information about BPM administration from the Oracle BPM Administrators’ Guide.
The book covers almost everything one needs to know about BPM and the authors have made sure; the reader is not bogged down by too much text and concepts incomprehensible. I have been selectively reading chapters repeatedly and I would any day have this book stashed in my dashboard for quick reference!
Cheers,
-AR
