I recently had the opportunity to review IBM Websphere Application Server 8.0 Administration Guide by Steve Robinson which is published by Packt Publishing. I own several of Packt's other admin books and I like their DRM-free policy for eBooks.

I've been administering WebSphere Application Server for about 6 years beginning with WAS 6.0 and migrating through WAS 6.1 and WAS 7.0. I've not yet implemented WAS 8.0, so I was excited about reading this book to see what had changed.

Over the course of the time I've been doing administration, I've looked for a good book covering the current version of WAS. During the WAS 6.0/1 era, there were very few administration books out there that were current: they were mostly aimed at WAS 5.11 which was VERY different from WAS 6.0. During the WAS 7.0 timeframe, there were a number of administration guides out there from several publishers. While they were generally good, they usually seemed to lack something fairly major. Of course there's always the official manuals (something like 7 books and a couple of thousand pages) as well as the IBM RedBooks (free, but often very focused to allow a deep dive into a specific topic).

That being said, this book seems to do a very good job of covering the breadth of the product with one exception. As others have pointed out, it doesn't really cover the Network Deployment edition although it does touch on some of the features and some of the ways that it differs from the other products. This is not an oversight on the author's part as the following quote points out: "Scope is very important for the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (WAS ND) product, which is not covered in this book."

I would highly recommend this book for someone who's either new to the product, or someone who wants to see what has changed since previous versions of the product. It is very well written and seems to be fairly complete from a feature standpoint other than the intentional ND omission.