There are many people who were helpful in the creation of this book. I owe a great deal to Susan Pink for all her hard work editing this book and making sure that my ideas stayed on track and were easy to follow. I would also like to thank Allen Wyatt for helping construct the flow of many of the chapters in this book and adding additional material. Will Iverson did a great job as technical editor, making sure everything was just right and suggesting additional material as needed. Everyone at Wiley was easy to work with, and I appreciate your support. I would like to thank Melody Layne for working out the initial details of this book and making it a reality. Melody was also helpful in getting information about version 8.1 of WebLogic. Finally, I would like to thank everyone at the Studio B agency for helping with this and other book projects of mine. In particular, thanks to Laura Lewin for all your help and being my agent on this book.

This book gives you a broad understanding of BEA WebLogic Server. The main audience consists of developers and administrators, but anyone involved in a WebLogic project will benefit from reading this book. Managers can gain an overview of the components that make up their system. Quality assurance personnel can benefit from the same understanding. For developers, this book shows quick examples to get you up and running in many of the technologies supported by WebLogic. Rather than give you extensive application examples, I focus on short, easy-to-follow examples than can become the starting point for something more complex. For administrators, I step you through many common WebLogic tasks and the configuration settings you should use. Finally, everyone should have an understanding of how the components of a web application fit together and what WebLogic can do for your application. This book gives you that viewpoint too.