Rating: 
Summary: Required reading
Review: We have been using this book on a large EJB project and have been very happy with it. Monson-Haefel addresses the most complex parts of the EJB platform with a style that makes the book enjoyable to read and EJB fairly easy to learn. The first three chapters of the book explain the purpose, architecture, and implementation of EJB servers. This really helps our people to understand what was going on under the hood and why beans behave the way they do. Without this material, EJB would be a mysterious black box. We now understand EJB at it lowest levels, which makes our people more productive. The rest of the book provides a detailed explanation of how to develop each kind of bean (stateless, stateful, and entity beans) using an example application. As the book proceeds it builds on the example increasing the complexity incrementally. What's especially appealing is that example is not so large that it's distracting. The book is very focused and the examples add rather then detract from the book. One of the books greatest strengths is the way it covers Enterprise JavaBeans in detail. Chapter 8, for example, goes into detail about transactions, database locking, isolation levels, and how transactions are propagated. In addition, the same chapter explains how exceptions impact transactions -- a very real issue when developing large-scale projects. There is also a great chapter on "design strategies" which introduces ideas like the business interface and bulk accessors. While these designs strategies are invaluable to our project, we would like to see a lot more of them. In particular a section on design patterns in EJB would be very helpful. Hopefully this kind of material will be added in a future edition. EJB is fairly complex, so a good book like this one is a gold mine. We now have about 20 developers working on our EJB project. Every time we add a developer to our project, they are handed a new copy of this book and told to read it. Without out this book most of our new developers would be hopelessly lost. If you are going to use EJB in your project, then you absolutely must have this book -- its essential.
Rating: 
Summary: Contrarian
Review: I am giving it a very low rating only to counteract all the O'Reilly groupies :-). This book could use a lot more editing. It is thorough, but disorganized. It explains well, but teaches poorly. I'd recommend it only to someone who has experience with another distributed object system (corba or dcom) or has learned to do EJBs using the Ed Roman book. One of the problems with this book, and with many computer books, is that the author doesn't know how to explain a complex topic by unfolding it piece by piece. Instead, he begins by covering the entire topic in general terms, and then covers it over, successively, going into greater detail each time. Others have commented that it's repetitive -- it is. This "peeling of the onion" should occur, not as the primary pedagocigal tool, but in parallel with a detailed study of the parts. It's the instructor's job to figure out the order in which the parts are explained, so that the material is learned quickly. Personally, I ended up using it as a companion to the Ed Roman book, because M-H covers the same topics from a different angle. In the absence of all the rabid fans, I'd have given it three stars for beginners, and four for people who have used EJB.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: Great book on EJB. Will be difficult on first read. Repeated redings will help. Author leaves running of examples on the shoulders of readers rather than spoonfeeding. In one sense, it will be good. Trying to get the users running the examples might extend the discussion and make the book too big to comprehend. Can't neglect a single word. Sometimes author might reiterate some features. Author is well focussed on the objectives.
Rating:
Summary: The perfect intro to EJB
Review: I've bought tons of books in the past few years and most of them are fairly decent, but this book stands out as the best technical "how to" book I've ever read. It does a great job of explaining the differences between entity and session beans and when to use them on a project. It also goes into detail about how EJB servers work and about distributed computing in general. Its the perfect introduction to EJB.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: I found this book to be very helpful in my project working with Enterprise JavaBeans. It has good technical content and is very well written. It proved to be a good reference as it covers a lot of the policies of EJB in great detail. Of the two books available this one is far superior to the other which is flat and out of date.
Rating:
Summary: Complete, yet easy to understand.
Review: The author covers all of the important aspects of EJB, but he does it in a gradual way so that the reader is not overwhelmed by too much detail early on. He starts off with an excellent introductory chapter which explains why you might want to use distributed programming in the first place and gives a simple example that gives the reader a solid perspective on the big picture. Too many books dive right into the details without ever taking the time to give the reader that frame of reference. Some readers may find the material a little repetitive because concepts are restated in subsequent chapters with more detail added. I personally liked this approach because it helped to reinforce the concepts in my mind by hearing many of them more than once. One small negative about the book is the way it attempts to cover both EJB 1.1 and 1.0. I was not interested in learning about the old standard and I thought having it in the book cluttered it up, and in some cases it was difficult to tell where the 1.0 discussion ended and the 1.1 discussion resumed. I think this book is the "definitive" book on EJB and it should be a part of any EJB developers library. What really sets this author apart from others is his ability to "teach" the material rather than just presenting facts and sample code for the reader to analyze.
Rating: 
Summary: Dissapointing
Review: Bought this book on basis of glowing reviews by other readers. Have been unable to get to grips with it, however. It is not that it is overly technical, or badly written, just that it is so bland and uninspiring. Part of the problem is that I am starting to realise that EJB is not going to solve all the problems I hoped it would (well container managed persistence did sound too good to be true!). Nevertheless, I do not feel that this is the book we have all been waiting for and advise caution.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book
Review: I started reading this book a few days ago and finished yesterday. It's a fast read and full of valuable information. What I liked best about the book is that it explained everything in plain English. You can spend weeks trying to figure out EJB by reading articles and vendor documentation, or you can read this book in a few days and learn everything you need. O'Reilly really did a great job with this book. I wish they were all this good.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!!
Review: This is a great book. It's a good introduction to EJB covering everything you need to start developing. If you're serious about EJB then you should read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Required reading but has flaws
Review: Overall this is a manditory book for any java developer interested in EJB. That said, the book has it's problems. At times is exaustingly repetitive. The examples could be better.
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