I am having some serious issues with trying to get things going.
I went through everything, but I was missing some libraries on my local box.

First I was missing weblogic.jar so I pulled it from the server, now I am getting the following:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.bea.xml.XmlException

It seems like the book only suggests ways to code on the server, which is something I would rather avoid. Any suggestion on where to look at resolving this issue or options would be useful. I have just been running around in circles to the point I almost want to send the book back and find a new one, as even google doesn't seem to help.

WebLogic Server assumes that developers have access to a WLS installation. While you can run clients without the server runtime either by building a wlfullclient.jar or by using wlthint3client.jar and other applicable thin client jars.

In your case, the problem is that weblogic.jar is no longer sufficient. If you open up weblogic.jar and look at the Manifest, you will begin to understand why--it's the Class-Path entries that refer to other jars by relative paths...

Like I said, you can try wlfullclient.jar for compiling but some of the tools (e.g., WLST) will not work without a WebLogic Server installation.

Hope this helps,
Robert Patrick