Dr. Zakir Laliwala and Irshad Mansuri have written an exceptional introduction to the Activiti business process engine in “Activiti 5.x Business Process Management Beginners Guide”. The book is a fantastic companion to the Activiti user manual and Activiti in Action. The book is written with the beginner process analyst in mind. It has lots of examples showing hands-on methods for using Activiti. The book is extremely accessible and little theoretical or programming knowledge is assumed. The book covers all topics needed to get started with Activiti. It first demonstrates installation on a user’s machine and then everything up to implementing advanced workflows and complex event processing. This book is best read front to back, and is not something that I’d use as a reference book.
One critic of the book is that it relies on heavy use of screenshots. These are great for helping a reader test an example. Though it means that the reader is sometimes left puzzled by what each step is doing. For example, when explaining how to deploy a process, we are told to generate a .bar. It then shows how to make the file using the eclipse plug-in; but, there is no description of what a .bar file is or why it is needed. A further reading sections in each chapter would be an improvement. Overall the book will guide a beginning Activiti user to a point where they understand basic terminology will be able to create and deploy a process on Activiti. The style of writing used for this book does make getting started with Activiti very easy.
Laliwala, Z, Mansuri, I (2014), Activiti 5.x Business Process Management Beginners Guide, Packt Publishing
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