Rating:  - Simply The Best
This is one book every J2EE architect/developer should have on his/her desk. Using the strategies in this book will make your applications more robust, make you more productive, and make your code easier to understand and maintain. Anyone designing, architecting, or coding with J2EE will find this book to be extremely useful.
It is simply the best
Rating: - One of the landmark technical books of the past few years
This is the most useful book I have read so far on best practices in developing web applications and J2EE enterprise applications.
The problems we try to solve with web applications are varied and complex, and J2EE technology generally makes creating a solution very difficult for the unwary. J2EE provides a lot of complex, suboptimal alternatives for the parts you need to put a web application together, and this book provides much needed guidance in how to get to best practices and how to avoid blindly following bad advice from the pundits. The chapter on how basic OO practices relate to J2EE applications is worth the book, and the advice on persistence, use of JSP and other web tier technologies, use (and non-use) of EJB, and classloading are all excellent.
But it is not a perfect book; here are a couple of caveats. J2EE technologies and best practices move fast, and almost all of the examples in this book use Rod's earlier framework that grew into the Spring framework, so the examples are amost all dated. Also dated is Rod's coverage of JSP, as this book was written before the release of JSP 2.0, and Rod does not cover the shift in best practices for JSP that the newer release represents. He does hint at new practices however, and points out the potential of the (at the time) upcoming JSP 2.0 release.
One more note, this book covers different topics than the more recent "Expert J2EE Design and Development (Without EJB)," and that book (which covers Spring among other topics) refers back to this one a number of times, so even though this book is dated, it is still quite useful in addition to, not instead of, it's companion volume. (..And that's my own opinion. I'm not affiliated with the author or the publisher.)
Rating: - Best Software Design Book
This book is incredible. Even though it may be a bit dated as it pre-dates Spring and Hibernate, it is still worth reading every page.
This book outlines good software design concepts that can be applied with or with out of J2EE. A lot of it could be applied outside of Java also.
After reading this, I wish I could have apprenticed with Johnson as my mentor in my early development days.
Rating: - Excellent J2EE Book for Developers & Architects
Excellent book to help you choose the right technology for your project.
Covers several frameworks, patterns, and discusses alternatives for the presentation, web, and data tiers.
Interesting ideas about the use (or overuse) of EJBs.
Rating:  - Good Content, Poor Editing
I am new to J2EE. I went to some Sun training and got a nice overview of what J2EE is. Now comes the question, how to use J2EE? There are so many decisions to be made. How do I make them? This book seems to do a very nice job of helping with that question.
However, I am disappointed in the editing of this book. I have read too many sentences that had glaring mistakes, enough that this is a distraction while reading, but don't let that stop you from buying this book.
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