Rating: 
Summary: Nice Approach
Review: Does a good job going over the life cycles of beans, EJBObjects, and Home Interfaces. I like the approach of doing Entity Beans before Session beans. It gives a different angle. I wish it would devote more chapters to transactions with full examples. Most EJB books just give at most one chapter to this topic, which I believe is one of the most important topics.
Rating: 
Summary: Saving grace
Review: I don't want to go into detail, the other reviewers do a very good job of this. However, as someone who has been working with EJB almost since its inception, Haefel's books have been a saving grace since there is so little other documentation. You can actually check out Sun's EJB-interest mailing list and see Haefel participating in discussions with the architects from EJB vendors (like Sriram Srinivasan of Weblogic) and Sun designers of the spec itself like Vlada Matena. Basically it is apparent that this guy has really done his homework. If I were required to make critical suggestions: 1.) Keep the EJB versions in separate books - it is difficult to use this as a working 1.1 reference with 1.0 code all over. Please get a 1.2 version out asap! 2.) Due to your experiences from the beginning, have another book that attacks the more advanced issues such as clustering architecture, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction for Enterprize Javabeans (EJB)
Review: 2 weeks ago I barely knew anything about Enterprize Javabeans (EJB). Now, after reading most of the book I can definitely say I know the subject. The author patiently explains us the basics - yet also goes into the deeper aspects of EJB. The book is filled with examples, which makes learning so much easier (don't you hate it when there are very few examples, or there is no sample output??). I must say, EJB is a pretty boring subject - but the book did a good job of keeping me awake! One comment I do have, is that the book doesn't explain very well how to deploy beans.. I still have problems with my weblogic server. But I guess that's not the point of the book, so it still deserves 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: A must for EJB developers!
Review: The EJB guru Monson-Haefel's strength lies in his knowledge of thirty years of server side history, backed up with excellent illustrations that makes sense. His first chapter is simply superb! And when you get the understand of "Why EJB's" then you can continue. This is very important, and Monson-Haefel knows hows to explain you this in his book "Enterprise JavaBeans". If you are a poor college student, and can only afford one EJB book, then buy this one. For your birthsday present get Ed Roman's "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans". They are both a must. Five stars is not an exaggeration. Beside the fact that Monson-Haefel always answers my questions (and I am probably not the only one). I think you can call it extra service. A nice guy, Monson-Haefel.
Rating: 
Summary: Finished reading and still need explanation.
Review: I read and believed the 5 star reviews. Then found out that I do NOT have a comprehensive step by step tutorial, or even explanation. It doesn't matter that the other books like Roman's are worse (they are). This book tries to give you the whole picture, of all versions, supposedly with a certain project in mind, but never with a complete picture of what needs to be DONE. If you ever bought the "Java Beans" from o'Reilly, this is about the same. Many words, going around and around. It is NOT a book for: "OK I want to make an enterprise site. Here's the architecture of the site. Here's how EJB makes it easy. Let's use this tool here, and get to work". Sorry. (I really am)
Rating:
Summary: Very neatly explained for EJB beginners
Review: I haven't checked lot of books on EJB's but tried this on friends advise and there is nothing to worry about my purchase. I am currently working on EJB project and am able to get a head start with this handy. Very interesting to read!!
Rating:
Summary: Great book for EJB developers
Review: This book is excellent. It's so well written that it's actually interesting to read. A lot of technical books are a bit dull, but you won't get bored reading this book. Others have done a good job of explaining its contents (see "Good to the last drop!" by David Holts) so I won't go there. I will say, however, that the O'Reilly book explains everything is plain English and is very accessible to the average Java developer. It's also detailed enough to make for a good reference. I read a couple of detractors who say that this book is either unorganized or uninteresting. I have no idea what book they were reading but it wasn't O'Reilly's EJB book. This book is extremely well organized and is one of the best technical books I've ever read (after 13 years in IT I've read a lot of books). I wouldn't pay much attention to the critics, I don't think they would know a good book if they saw one.
Rating:
Summary: Very good text
Review: This book is a great EJB starter. I picked it up for a new project and had no problems working through how EJBs worked and how they needed to be coded. Mind you, the type-os and mistakes were corrected on his website and the examples only worked when I downloaded them. Some theory could have been explained a little more in depth because some parts left more questions than answers (in my mind, maybe not so for others). Otherwise it is easy to understand, very well laid out and for someone starting out with EJB (especially with BEA WebLogic) it is an excellent text. I don't normally write reviews but this book made it possible for me to get an EJB project started, coded and completed. Not many books in my library can fit that description.
Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: I'm not an expert in Java or distributed objects, but I really enjoyed reading this book. I've already used what I learned to convince my company to look at EJB for our next project. The book is easy to read but the subject is not easy to learn. I had to read a couple chapters twice before things started sinking in -- I'm still confused about some things. The book, however, does a great job of explaining EJB and everything else. Just be prepared to work at it if you're a complete neophyte like I am. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to move into J2EE and understand how EJB works. If you're new to Java you'll need to study that first (the book expects you to know Java already), but everything else is explained very carefully so that even the most inexperienced people like me can understand things like distributed objects, CTMs, and transactions.
Rating: 
Summary: OK at best
Review: I'd tend to agree with an earlier reviewer that this is a much overrated book. The explanations are too verbose and repetitive to the point of being a little irritating. The book starts with a rather shallow overview of various distributed object architectures (CORBA, COM) and component transaction monitors(MTS and the CORBA component model), followed by two reasonably well written chapters on EJB architecture - the next three chapters are hands-on stuff where you have to wade through tedious and lengthy explanations to get at the key ideas involved in developing session and entity beans. The chapter on transactions contains some useful information, but again is characterised by agonizingly verbose explanations(for a much better and concise review of transactions in EJB, refer to the transactions chapter in the J2EE Blueprints book authored by Nick Casseem and others - if you want the nitty-gritty details refer to the specs). The chapter on design strategies is disappointing - it hardly provides any useful strategies or tips except the idea on business interfaces which tries to maintain a clean separation between the container methods and the business methods by providing a placeholder for the business methods in a separate interface. For a more relevant overview of EJB design strategies, see the 'Architect's corner' article on Java Report issue of September 2000. To sum it up - the chapters on EJB architecture are quite ok but the rest of the material can be compressed in half the size of the book. As of now, this one has to do in the absence of any other decent book on EJB in the market.
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