Rating:  - upside-down
Ok, let me start by saying that the author of this book is indeed well prepared and able to go into detail in his explanations. If you are really interested in programming with EJB this is one of the books you should check, despite its many flaws.. The first three chapter make
a fully successful attempt to protect the mysteries of J2EE from
profane eyes by putting a deep sleep spell on the reader.
If you survive it you will probably find yourself wondering about the order in which the story is told...
First a hurried example involving a session bean collaborating with an entity bean, then one chapter on the client side (which of course you need to understand how the heck you could have tested the beans just developed), then entity beans get presented again but this time in more detail.. only you get to know first the CMP flavour (which is the more complicated) and the BMP flavour after, totally against what common sense would advice. Then you go into session beans, which , being simpler than entities should have been presented before..and how about a chapter 16 on deployment descriptors? They are the configuration files you need to deploy ANY EJB and you explain them at the end of the book? The impression is this author would be much better if he stopped thinking by compartments
and trying to make things appear much more difficult and deep than what they actually are. Also, the workbooks with the exercises for this text are a joke. You will be presented with
canned code and a few ant scripts to execute, compile, build
deploy and run the code. Very kewl but if you know what you are doing you can do it yourself and if you don't .. well clicking on a few batch files or executing ant scipts won't teach you much I can assure you..
Rating:  - Very Good
The book is in good condition, time of delivered aceptable.
Rating:  - not your first book on EJB
Ahi, ahi, forget about getting this book if you know nothing about EJB: it would be a big waste of time. Get it if you already know about EJB and you want to go over it again. After you know about EJB and while reading this book you wonder "why do they explain things in such a difficult and confusing way, when it is all so simple?".
As a second book on the subject though, it contains value, so get it anyway, if you really want, but don't go nuts reading it as first.
Rating: - Not a good beginners choise
I bought this book to learn EJB for a class and it is a difficult book to read. The author has a good understanding of the topic but the style is fairly dry and does not have enough in the way of examples. On the other hand the website and workbooks they supply are great.
Mastering EJB by Ed Roman looks like a better entry level book from what I have read of it. You can download a pdf of it at [website].
Rating:  - Poorly written
Unlike other O'Reilly titles, found this one to be extremely poorly written - too verbose and yet imprecise! The section on "Concurrency" in chapter 3 is a good example of why both beginners and advanced developers should avoid this book.
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