Rating:  - not a developer book
I guess probabaly because of the aruthors' back ground (from Sun's documentation group), this book reads much like a User's Guide of Sun's J2EE SDK. It provides a couple of examples and tells you step-by-step how to compile, deploy and test these examples onto Sun's J2EE platform. There is no substantial treatment on the high level J2EE architecture, technology, and APIs. It provides little help for you if you want to jump-start J2EE programming.
Rating:  - May as well just read the spec
Much of this seems to be lifted from the spec. No examples to speak of. I haven't seen Apte's book. I hope it is better.
Rating:  - This tutorial needs a tutorial!
This was a great book to get started but it's too thin on the fundamentals and (in my opinion) too focused on Sun's J2EE SDK tool to be of serious value in the "real world". It is a good book if you just need to get going with J2EE, on the other hand, but only if you really want or need step-by-step instructions -- I found this to be the biggest selling point of this book, since every activity had a detailed list of the steps needed to get the examples running. That said, I really wanted more overview of the topics covered in the example programs instead of simply being told how to get the sample applications running. This book would be perfect for me if there were a 2nd companion book that went into detail on the fundamentals introduced in this tutorial. Maybe a 2 volume bundled set would be better, with this book being the step-by-step guide for examples and another title introducing and detailing the concepts that the tutorial uses. I also found this book to be outdated now that J2EE 1.4 is coming out: I spent a lot of time online reading the "addendum" that's available for free!
Rating: - Shallow, confusing, and disconnected
I don't ordinarily pan books online, but I was so disappointed in this one that I felt an obligation to prospective purchasers. If your aim is simply to gain experience deploying someone's J2EE application by following instructions, then I suppose this would be a good book for you. I was looking for more than that.
Each major section is written by different writer (credited, by the way). Although there is some continuity, the tone and pace differ from section to section. For example, in some sections, code is explained prior to presentation, while in others it is explained after presentation. I find the former approach annoying, since I can read Java code just fine. The explanations would be valuable if they went into subtleties or fine points, but they don't... they just say in words what you can read in code.
Many, many pages are devoted to keystrokes to use with deploytool. The conceptual glue of deployment is left to one's imagination.
And finally, many questions are left unanswered. Here is one example: a section on J2EE Connector Architecture goes into XA transactions because you have to know what one is to make the proper deployment choices. We are told that an XA transaction is one that spans resources. In other words, it is a distributed transaction. I know that distributed transactions get into hot water if one of the resources does not have adequate transaction management. An obvious question is "How does J2EE know if a resource has the right kind of transaction management, and what does it do if not?" The text gives no hint that this is even an issue.
I would not recommend this book. There are better ones out there.
Rating: - Poor writing on interesting topic
First of all, let me asure you, that I really like the Connector Architecture - there's nothing wrong with the topic. But this book is not good at explaing it. Seems like the authors/editors did a very bad job on coordinating their work. Often I just don't get it - and no - it's not because I'm a dummy. I have been working with J2EE for several years now, as well as instructing courses for BEA and for the IT University of Copenhagen in the use of J2EE.
When reading this book you never get the feeling, that you've fully understood a topic - probably cause they've only told you half of the story. I read the whole book - because JCA is an important addition to J2EE - and because I kept hoping that the writing style would get better in the next chapter, but no.
My suggestion is: either read the specification OR wait for another book. I wouldn't recommend this book to ANYONE - even if you could get it for free. I sure do wonder why other people like this book...?? Are we really talking about the same bunch of paper?
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