I got a surprise in my inbox the other day. Manning released the final ebook version of Wicket In Action. I was surprised because it had been a while since I got an update from Manning that I honestly forgot I had purchased the book. Normally I read a book a couple of times and then write a review. I'm trying something new with the Wicket book. I'm going to write a review of each chapter and then a summary review. So this is my review of Chapter 1 which is also available as a free download from the Wicket In Action web site at Manning.

Chapter 1 starts off like most tech books starting with a brief history of Wicket, the problems it solves, and ends with an introduction to developing with the Wicket framework. The author explains things well and throws in a bit of humor here and there. No true tech book is complete without a reference to Star Wars and sure enough it is in there. It helps that your framework is named after a fuzzy little ewok. Or is it a piece of equipment used in Cricket? I guess you'll need to read it to find out.

The author does a great job getting you excited for the rest of the book. Screenshots are shown of an existing Wicket application and it looks nice. How difficult it is to get to that point using Wicket remains to be seen, however. Simple code snippets of Wicket java and markup keep the reader interested in what is to come. Overall, Chapter 1 is great lead off point.

The only problem I had was example code was given but no clear direction on how to execute that code locally was provided. There are no step by step instructions on downloading Wicket, setting up the web.xml, etc. This could be in a later chapter or an appendix but I am not hopeful. A quick search on the PDF for 'web.xml' only returned a snippet for getting Spring working.

Check back for my review of Chapter 2.