Customer Reviews
Not good for new programmers - By: V. Loganathan, 05 Aug 2008 
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arrangedin order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.
Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3 - By: C. A. Rodger, 13 Jun 2008 
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, & it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 & EJB3 throughout the text.
If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week & got 90%, using only this book & the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.
The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dipin & out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts & transactions are featuredin more than one chapter, which is why it is better that you read the book from start to finish. You won't need to read chapter 17 onwards unless you want to know about web services.
It might seem like a long haul but it is definitely worth spending the time reading this book.
Best EJB 3.0 book out there - By: Remon Van Vliet, 23 Apr 2008 I have a couple of EJB3.0 books but this one is pretty much the one that's permanently on my desk. It's a perfect reference for me now & was a great source of information while I was familiarizing myself with EJB3.0.
The workbooks are relatively informative as well even for readers that do not use JBoss (me being one of those people). The only minor issue I can think of is the limited Web Service coverage & the JPA sections are a little limited. That said the book's main focus is EJB3.0 & it covers extremely well.
I cannot recommend it enough.
Comprehensive - By: J. Foster, 16 Apr 2006 
I found this book to be generally ok. The only problems I ran into is that it can be a little wooly at times, & the way the examples are setup can be a little confusing.
It really is a book for people with a good working knowledge of Java. You'll struggle if you don't already know what your doing. But equally, I was pleased with the way it thoroughly explains the tech behind EJB.
A good EJB 2.0 and 2.1 book, plus a good JBoss 4 workbook - By: , 14 Nov 2004 This book, now at the fourth edition, is very well organized. First of all there is a good introduction to the primary services featured by the J2EE / EJB architecture, so you don't need to have a backgroud about this, but, obviously for every book of this kind, you need a strong know-howin enterprise programming. You cannot start to programin Java just reading this book.
The book was written across two release of the EJB specification: the 2.0 & the 2.1 (now we are waiting for the 3.0 with a lot of new characteristics, such as a lighter container) & the author is very efficientin readily signaling differences between he two releases.
Moreover the author is always very accuratein details description.
Probably, this kind of attention, put the authorin the condition of being quite redundant, but I think is tipical of US books (I don't know if this could be a problem, just think the book could be lighter, reading sometimes going work by subway).
There is an interesting chapter about design (just an introduction) & another chapter about alternatives, such as Hinernate, & it's a good idea because you always need alternatives & seems that the author is not only an EJB evangelist.
Thare is not a bibliography & you need to follow also course, or just read a book, about J2EE/EJB best practices or patterns (I prefer best practices, even if less fashionable)
I think that the better idea that this book point out is the embedding of a second book: it includes a workbook that introduce the reader to the JBoss Application Server & helps himin the deployment & execution of the example using JBoss. The workbook is written by two JBoss "masters": they are Bill Burke, (do you know JBoss AOP ?) & Sacha Labourey (what about clustering featuresin JBoss ?). The two books are simply synchronized.
