On a recent project, I was tasked with building a portal application based on the Liferay server. Liferay is a portal server that provides content management, collaboration tools and social networking. As with any portal server product, you will need to add custom applications specific to your business. In my case, I needed to develop a set of custom portlets.

The following books helped me to get up to speed on Liferay. The books are listed in three different categories. The User’s Guide shows you how to use the Liferay portal server (creating users, publishing content, creating discussion forums etc). The Developer’s Guide is for adding custom portlets using Java. The Sys Admin guide is for administering the Liferay server.

Liferay User’s Guide

Liferay Developer’s Guide

Liferay Administrator’s Guide

Also, don’t forget about the free resources available at Liferay.com: