Note: Free evaluation copy provided by the publisher.
Title: Developing Web Applications with Oracle ADF Essentials
Author: Sten E. Vesterli
I am quite newbie in the Java world, and I have only done an academic use of the Oracle ecosystem (and mostly just the database). I come from a .NET work so comparisons are unavoidable.
ADF stands for Application Development Framework, a huge FW to build all kind of applications using good practices like business entities, data abstraction (it includes a huge ORM), MVC webpages with few lines of code, data bindings....
The problem with it, and the reason why this book might be interesting for you, is that ADF seems to suffer the Enterprise & Java illness: So many pieces, with version incompatibilities, frameworks and packages supported only in some revisions, others needing manual tweaks and configuration changes...
ADF presents itself as "build without coding", and indeed you can build basic management apps without& a single line of code, but you will for sure spend quite some time fighting with configuration of pretty basic things like database or source code control.
This book guides you on quite a lot of those caveats, not only showing the most basic configuration-driven examples but also going later into creating custom business layers, data bindings and securing ADF Essentials (using Apache Shiro because the free version of ADF comes without a security layer...).
It has lots of screenshots, step by steps and I think everyone will have an easy time& following it. Also hints to more advanced topics by providing links to blog posts.