Rating: 
Summary: Search is over the EJB book is here!
Review: If you want to master EJB, then the Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans is the right book for you! It covers everything from basics of the EJB to the more advanced topics like transactions, performance and clustering. You will also learn how to choose the most suitable EJB server for your project.Thanks to Ed Roman, et al for the most comprehensive book about EJB technology. I would strongly recommend this book to the community. P.S. Don't forget to download the source code from TheServerSide.com and enjoy testing what you have learnt!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for beginners and more advanceed EJB readers
Review: This is one of those rare books that is equally beneficial both to readers who are brand new to the topic and readers with substantial experience in the topic. EJB is a very large and challenging topic to explain to beginning EJB developers. The authors do an excellent job of explaining the concepts in a very clear and well thought out manner. The book is very focused on those topics that are most important to the beginning EJB developer and clarifies them wonderfully. I believe individuals who have already been programming EJBs for a little while will also enjoy this book as a way to add depth and clarity to their EJB knowledge. The author's inter-mingle a substantial number of "best-practices," and advanced issues that will be very interesting to the new and old EJB developer. If you have the time and patience to read a 1200 page book, "Professional EJB" by Wrox Press covers a lot more material and depth. However, if you don't have the time, patience, or desire to read a 1200 page book, this "Mastering EJBs" book is much more manageable and focused at 600 pages. The O'Reilly press "Enterprise Java Beans" book by Monson-Haefel is also quite good. However, like most O'Reilly books, I think it is actually too focused and doesn't provide a clear enough picture of how the whole EJB world fits together. So if you want a moderate size book with excellent explanations, good level of depth, and excellent insights, this book is it.
Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Good introductory book.
Review: I'm a software engineer, experienced with Java, server side programming and perf & scalability issues in general, and with both an academic and an industry background. New to EJB, which is why I read this book. This book is actually 4 stars as an introductory book. It got me to up to speed with EJB, enough to understand it's programming paradigm fairly well. However, where I'm trying to go is to deeply understand perf. and scalability issues that will arise for large deployments (millions of users, for e.g) and exactly what EJBs offer in that area. Although clustering and transactions are discussed, the level of detail I need is greater - techniques for optimal caching are only skimmed, not thoroughly discussed. Additionally, one or more of the authors has this rather irritating habit of using the wrong terminology. Cases in point:
1) "The Halting Problem" of computer science is, rather cheekily exemplified by a program that blocks forever. Check it out for yourself from other sources - that is NOT the halting problem. It isnt that simple.
2) "Store and forward" is again, rather cheekily, described as "spool messages and send them when the queue comes back up". No, that is not what it is. Check it out for yourself from other sources. It is originally a networking term used in a different context. Simply because you are storing and forwarding doesnt mean you unilaterally christen your technique "store-and-forward", without investigating the original and well-known usage of the term.
3) "Reliability" in the term RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) is exemplified by - "if the simplest request takes 10ms to complete with one user, the system is reliable if the same request takes 10ms with 1,000,000 concurrent users.". That is NOT the definition of reliability. Reliability has more to do with fault detection and avoidance, not what is mentioned above, which seems more to do with throughput.
These are only a few of the incorrectly used terms. To most, I am only nitpicking. But for those who really want to go deep and do not want to waste 30-40% of their time reconciling terminologies, this is important. If the authors dispensed with trying to rename and falsely name common terms, their ideas would be communicated quicker, at least to audiences who are used to the well-known meanings of common terms.
Rating:
Summary: The best EJB book
Review: This is definitely the best EJB book. I wish this were the only EJB book out there on the market so I could have avoid wasting time reading other EJB books before reading this one. For those who came from C background, you may find Ed Roman has the class of K&R and W. Richard Stevens (assume you have read <C Programming Language> (from K&R) and <Unix Network Programming> from Stevens), except the strong commercial flavor. Although it is true that, as one of the review pointed out, some terminology is not used or explained accurately, they are not EJB specific terms but rather more general computer science terminology. So this is definitely a 5 star book of EJB, if not for overall computer science. People may think this book does not provide deep enough view about Transaction. Actually, this book provides enough concise information about Transaction, as an EJB book. I had the experience of searching through pile of Oracle junks and did not find much helpful information that provided better or deeper view about Transaction than this book did.
Rating:
Summary: Buy this book!
Review: Mastering Enterprise Java Beans, Second Edition, is perhaps the best book I have ever read on the topic of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Ed Roman, et al, have done an excellent job! The book is concise, to the point, and leaves you with a clear understanding of EJB. He thoroughly covers the new EJB 2.0 standard and the book includes many additional perks such as Transactions and EJB Best Practices. I had many questions in mind when I started reading the book and the book answered them all. If you are serious about EJBs you must have this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction on EJB
Review: One thing is that you won't become a master of EJB after you read this book. But you won't become a master of anything just after reading a book. :-) The book provides in-depth introduction on EJB and related topics, such as different types of enterprise beans (Session/Entity/MessageDrivenBean), how EJBObject (EJB container) interacts with the actual bean object (strategies of intercepting the request and delegation), CMP and BMP, etc. The author did excellent job on these topics. The author also tries to cover some advanced topics and best practices, sadly, this is where the book lost its shine. Except chapter 10 about transaction is good, the rest of the chapters are either too basic (e.g. lazy loading, aggregation vs. composition, wrap entity beans with session beans etc.) or too shallow (e.g. clustering) to provide any practical values. Some chapters, in my opinion, even are unnecessary (e.g. chapter 15 "Starting Your EJB Project on the Right Foot" and chapter 16 "Choosing an EJB Server") They are more or less related to the develop process instead of EJB. One particular pitfall is that bean inheritance topic is not touched at all. Though EJB specs does not specify on this area, any serious EJB projects would inevitably touch/involve it. At least, the author should shed some lights on the best practices related to this topic. Overall, as an introductory level book, it serves its purpose.
Rating:
Summary: good
Review: this is good book if u want to learn ejb concepts easily. author is not confusing and he is very clear.
but this book is not related to any webserver like web logic or websphere. wont help in developing web application straight away. but concepts are thoroughly explained
Rating:
Summary: Good for preparation for SCBCD exam
Review: Briefly. You read this book thoroughly, complement it with a mock exam and you are ready to clear the SCBCD (Sun Certified Business Components Developer) exam. Not to mention that after reading it you have a good foundation for continuing with "EJB design patterns" or "Bitter EJB". Only after reading something more advanced than "Mastering EJBs" you are ready to start EJB programming since it tells "how" but not much about "where and what for".
Rating:
Summary: A very good book
Review: This book is really very good in explaining EJB concepts. It is an excellent book for beginners. I got Enterprise Java Beans book from O'Reilly and felt it to be too advanced for beginners. But this book does a great job by explaining EJB concepts in a simple manner but still touching all concepts and gives us a big unterstanding about EJB. Although the Weblogic version has changed after the book got published, it is not really hard to make the code run in the newer version of Weblogic. Infact I did not find any difference in deploying EJB in Weblogic 6.1 or 8.1. I used the weblogic server 6.1 workbook and went through it and did the same steps in Weblogic server 8.1 and was successful in running the code. WARNING: Do not forget to check the book's errata while reading the book. There are some printing mistakes in the book. So do not hesitate to buy this book just because the Weblogic server version has changed. This book is really good and I am enjoying it.
Rating:
Summary: The best book on EJB
Review: Want to learn EJB and use it. Get this book.
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