Rating:  - This is the worst text-book I've ever had!!!
I have to read this text book for one of my 3rd year Computer Science course. My professor picked the worst book there is for us to learn. The exam is open book but I can't use any of the stuff that's written in this piece of sh*t. Whever wrote this book should jump off the building and die. It tried to include too many topic at once and fail to explain how to used each of them. All it does is throw you examples of the stuff they wrote. Firstly, their examples don't work. Secondly, that is not now most programmer will approach it. It tries to teach connection with a database but did not provide any PreparedStatement or Statement and did not provide text on DriverManger.getConnection. How the hell do we connect then?? Bottom line is this book sucks!! EJB, Servlets, Jsp, JMS, JNDI, XML, JDBC, JavaMail my A**!!!
Rating:  - Get up to speed quickly
The purpose of this book is to get you up and running quickly. It is for people who want to get their hands on the technology quickly, before having to digest a thousand pages of text. It has step-by-step cookbook tutorials that walk you through deploying and writing your first J2EE applications. I teach courses on J2EE, and I use this book plus Ed Roman's Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans.
The book does not provide complete coverage (and in some places is far from it), but you can get servlets, JSPs, EJBs of all flavors and a simple database up and running quickly. In this role, as a quick start to a complicated technology, the book performs admirably, although not without its faults.
Some people may rather skip this tutorial and go straight to books that provide deeper, more comprehensive coverage of the J2EE topics. I haven't found a single book that I like for all the topics; I would suggest three books: one on EJBs, one on JMS and another on Servlets and JSPs. You might even want to get separate books on servlets and JSPs as some of the better texts target one or the other. And of course, you can always download the tutorial for free--I happen to like a printed and bound version.
I have to mention that the J2EE SDK that the book uses is a just-barely-adequate-for-learning J2EE implementation, and many things you take for granted (such as mapping CMP entity beans to a database schema) are missing. You'll quickly want to move on to almost ANY other application server before taking on any of your own projects.
Rating: - Good book
This book gives a good in-depth look at J2EE Connectors JCA and its use for enterprise application integration. Though J2EE and Connector architecture have evolved, this book still gives a good overview and background. Examples are not complete but have been explained well. Book assumes that reader is familiar with other parts of J2EE and that could have been better. Overall, I found the book useful while writing a connector for my project. So giving it four stars.
Rating:  - Good supplement, not authoratative source.
It is a bit shallow as one of the others reviewers pointed out. But its coverage of EJB-QL is the best I've seen. Good piece on transactions as well. I would suggest getting Ed Roman's book for EJBs and Marty Hall's Core Servlets & JSP instead. If you want an more comprehensive coverage of servlets get the O'Reilly Servlet Programming book. Reading this book side by side is helpful, because it sheds some new light on the issues and give you a better understanding. I would reccomend this book as a reference, not as a primary source for learning.
Rating:  - An excellent deployment primer
I think some of the critics miss the point of a book like this. There are many excellent books about EJB and Servlet/JSP etc, but there are not many which show the precise details about how to get applications up and running on a specific platform.
No, the tutorial doesn't address the higher-level issues of architecting and building working systems. I recommend Ed Roman's Mastering Enterprise Javabeans and/or Monson-Haefel's Enterprise Javabeans 3rd edition for that purpose. The latter book has a small series of platform-specific workbooks to handle the specifics, the best treatment of deployment which I have yet seen.
But this book is good for getting you up and running. Of course you can always use the online version to stay up to date, so unless you prefer the dead-trees version (as I do) use that one....
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