I recently had the pleasure of reviewing Tim Bish's new book Instant Apache ActiveMQ Messaging: Application Development How-To and wanted to share some thoughts. If you're new to messaging, new to ActiveMQ, or just want a quick, no-nonsense introduction to get up and running with ActiveMQ, then you gotta check out this book. It's a short read (70 pages or so), but it walks you through the details you need to know, explains things that otherwise might be glossed over but are important, and achieves its goal of a "quick-start book".
The book starts off with installing ActiveMQ, going through the startup/stopping scripts, and shows how to change configurations. Next, you get into building applications with the JMS API, using queues and topics, request-response patterns, scheduled message delivery, monitoring, testing with embedded brokers, connection pooling, virtual topics, and more! All along, you get to see how and why each functionality works, what to watch out for, and more detail.
There's a lot packed into this book. I recommend it. You can get it in e-book and paperback.
If you read it, let me know what you think!