Igor Vaynberg is not new to the Wicket landscape, being actually a core committer of the framework and a name that every Wicket developer well know.
The book, following the Packt well established "Cookbook" format, is not a comprehensive learning guide to the Apache Wicket framework; It's a cookbook, a list of 'recipes' aimed to solve specific, real problems. and It does just that, darn well.
The book is aimed at an audience of developers already skilled (at least a little bit) in the Wicket framework and in look for solutions to common day-to-day problems.
This book is, in this regard, exactly what the community was waiting for.
Igor is very clear, specific and never prosaic; The given examples are down-to-earth, real world examples of what you would expect to find and bang your head against when you develop your average Apache Wicket application.
Each chapter of the book is devoted to a particular aspect of the framework: Validating and converting user input, forms, i18n, data tables and views, tabs and borders, Ajax, charts, security and integration with middlewares (Spring, JBoss Weld, JPA).
It has not to be read sequentially; there are no long and complex projects to build and follow between each chapter; It's organization is perfect for being used as a reference; each chapter contains specific examples of "problems" to solve, a workable solution to the problem and a thorough explanation of "how" the solution works.
Every chapter has its clues, its 'tips' and hints that make this book a memorable reading for every Wicket developer; even the most basic examples on how to work out validation of a field give precious hints on how validation works 'under the hoods', or when it's better to access the value of a field during validation using the getConvertedInput() method instead of the model value (guess why ? read the book and you'll know..)
Decorating components, creating grids and sorting/filtering data, blocking until Ajax requests complete, adding charts with Open Flash Charts library; this book is full of incredible useful information that every Wicket developer will be able to leverage to improve its productivity and knowledge of this fantastic framework.