Holy book of EJB 2.1
This book is truly the complete book on EJB Specification 2.1 and more. By more I mean to say that not only does it focus on EJB and their real life implementations but also on the underlying technologies of distributed programming like RMI-IIOP and JNDI. It talks about the best practices and performance optimization techniques that can be used while working on EJBs. For me this book the holy book on EJBs.
This for people who do not know about EJB much and for those who are already grandmasters on them. For beginners, this book might look very heavy initially but slowly and slowly as you try to sink into the chapters you will get excellent conceptual knowledge about what EJBs are and how they are used. For masters, this offers the best reference manual available in the market.
Ok in its sense
The title says mastering EJB...which is ok for a title but this book lacks in content that is needed for a beginner. This book claims that it's audience will be a beginner or an advanced guy and I feel that it is oriented more towards the experienced reader. The first 3 chapters explains the basics of Enterprise computing using J2EE environment and a simple example of the Hello Bean EJB, which is good for a beginner. But once you start delving into chapters 4, 5 and furthur in, you will happen to see things for which you might ask yourself the question "Why have I got to do this?".
I'd recommed this book for a guy who already has a fair understanding of EJB and wants to get a through understanding of the concepts. For the rest of us, I'd recommend Head First as the starting point.
No longer a master
I have the two earlier editions of this book, but this book hardly added any value or did anything better than those earlier editions. The new chapters does not meet the expectations - I suspect the new authors messed up quality of the book. The new examples on EJB Web services is nothing but a hello world and I even doubt the new authors had any expertise to test those examples. Now I find this book does'nt make any help to me and it is no longer fit to call it as a Mastering EJB book. Now this book would collect dust in my shelf, because I find better examples in the Java web site and also at theserverside.com itself.
Excellent - great examples, covers everything
This is an excellent and complete book on EJB. I read 1st and 2nd edition of the O'Reilly EJB book based on recommendations; I have to say the Ed Roman book is far superior - he covers every detail, including peripheral considerations, and has complete and numerous examples. 1 downside - many typos - but thankfully they are so obvious, it doesn't detract from comprehension.
Good for a newbie but not the best
This is a good book for a newbie with loads of theories though this book stays far behind the enterprise level computing and on implementation of EJB driven applications. There's a huge gap between what this book describes and the real development environment of EJBs.
Never rely on the sample codes and the methodologies have been used in this book for those are not the best development approaches. This book consists of several pitfalls and not suitable to be used as an EJB development guideline (e:g: this doesn't solve the importance of PK classes and creating composite primary keys). Also never assume that this book describes the best EJB development methodologies just by fantasized by the way that the theories on EJB are presented.
If you seek more adventure on EJB this is probably not the best of books for this lacks some depth to the topics included. Apart from that, this book is quite ok for a newbie to get dirt with EJB and to understand the basics with the theories and fundamentals. If you like some fine grained info and you're a newbie, I'd suggest Applied Enterprise JavaBeans by Kevin Boone to brush up with what's missing here
(67 reviews)
