Rating: 
Summary: One of the best J2EE books available
Review: An outstanding book on alternatives to usually complex, heavyweight and expensive EJB development. Lightweight IoC/DI frameworks like Spring, and modern O/R tools like Hibernate and JDO are a must for every enterprise architect and developer worth his/her salt to understand, and Rod & Juergen do a stellar job at presenting the case for them. You'll want to buy copies for your co-workers...
Rating:
Summary: A great book that is a must-read for every developer/archite
Review: I've read this book several times since the day it shipped and I have to say that this is an excellent book for anyone working as a developer or architect working in the Enterprise Java arena. I absolutely love this book given my bias - I guess I should start by stating my bias. EJB bashing is a favorite past time of a lot of people. I happen to love EJB's, with the exception of entity beans and think EJB's are a great way to create software solutions are remotable, loosely coupled and powerful. I will agree that EJB's are way too complicated with all the stupid artifacts that you need to create to create and deploy an EJB. Having worked with EJB's since 1999, I guess I am so used to all of nuances of EJB's, I can write up deployment descriptors in my sleep. Having said that, I approached this book with a little apprehension as I hate these EJB-sucks book that don't really offer any intelligent discussion about the shortcomings of EJB nor do they offer a viable alternative. Another assumption I brought to the book was that this was just a Spring book with a little EJB bashing thrown in for good measure.
To my pleasant surprise, Rod Johnson and Juergen Hoeller have written an awesome book. This book does not take cheap shots - Instead there is a intelligent, thought provoking discussion about the pros and cons of EJB. In fact, the first 120 pages (Chapter 1-5) are just a great breakdown of application architecture with a through treatment of EJB. I loved this section and re-read it several times and I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything in this section. I would equate this to a great meaningful discussion you would have with someone who really understood application architecture and development and you could debate the pros and cons of the many alternative approaches that exist today.
Chapter 6 starts the discussion of Lightweight Containers and the idea of Inversion of Control (IoC). This is not a chapter on Spring; rather it is an overview of Inversion of Control and strategies like Dependency Injection in the context of Spring and PicoContainer.
The next chapter offers a quick introduction to the Spring Framework. As everyone already knows, the Spring Framework is a very popular open source application framework created by Rod Johnson. The co-author Juergen Hoeller is another lead developer of Spring. The chapter is Spring is fairly light and people hoping for a in-depth Spring tutorial will be disappointed. Instead this chapter offers a rather high-level overview that will get you some basic understanding of the Spring Framework. I guess it's hard to cover Spring in 43 pages.
After the cursory introduction to Spring, the book moves into Aspect-Orientated programming (AOP) concepts. This section starts with a very introduction to AOP before jumping into AOP implementation strategies. After a brief discussion of AspectJ, AspectWerkz, and JBoss AOP, the authors move into SpringAOP. After AOP, the books moves into Transaction Management where current J2EE approaches are discussed and then contrasted with the Spring approach.
Review trimmed to comply with Amazon's review guildlines for length. For more details, check my blog at j2eegeek dot com.
Rating: 
Summary: Lot of preaching about Spring and other alternatives to EJB
Review: If there is a 3 and a half, this book would have got that ranking from me. The book title consists of programmer to programmer, but there is hardly any code for practise in this book.
There is some repetition with respect to use of Singletons, Spring framework's advantages over pure EJB approach etc. Another negative I feel is too much talk and less helpful content for a pure programmer. This book will help some one think more positively about lightweight frameworks when compared to EJB part of J2EE. But the user needs more resources to get it going.
Coming to the positives:
1) There is nice coverage on usefulness of Test driven development(whole chapter assigned to preaching this aspect) which is good for we software engineers.
2) Good intro to light weight containers and inversion of controls.
3) Intro to AOP and details of different ways to go about it.
4) Whole chapter dedicated to nice coverage of performance and scalability issues.
I have not read the other title 'Exper one-on-one J2EE' from the same author, so I am not sure if there is repetition from that title though.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!!!
Review: If you were only able to buy one J2EE book, then this would be it. J2EE is a complex technology filled with opportunities to make judgment errors. This book clearly outlines the rationale and implications of J2EE decisions to avoid making those costly mistakes. The information in this book could be the difference between a success and a failure. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but not great
Review: Lots of info on the Spring framework, some good examples for Hibernate and iBATIS, but alot of repetition about why ejb's are bad and why Spring/other "lightweight" frameworks are good. Some arguments against ejb's are unconvincing: like they are too complex and hard to test. But on the whole if you're looking to get into Spring or are interested in Hibernate/iBATIS, or wonder what all the mumbling about inversion of control frameworks is about, then its worthwile.
Rating:
Summary: Enterprise Java Architects: Buy This Book
Review: My love affair with Java has lasted six years now. With enterprise architecture being the way to go, I've been reading about J2EE development using EJB for several months, trying to get my head around why simple things are made so hard using EJB. I was dreading training my developers in Java, and then having to show them EJB and figure out ways to help them be productive.
This book (and the Spring framework) are the light at the end of the tunnel. The concepts are grounded in commonly accepted best practices for application development, the arguments for the implementations chosen are sound, and the implementations themselves are simple and fast. Not to mention, the entire framework has been designed so that you can drop it at any moment and move on to the next big thing when it arrives. Try getting that out of an EJB implementation.
Spring has given me hope for enterprise Java development. If you are at all interested in simplifying your life as a Java developer and have become disillusioned or disappointed with EJB, then this book is a must have.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Rod Johnson again offers to his fans another great Java best-seller. This book is the next level of his previous book "J2EE Design and Development" and offers different information on different purposes but it doesn't about bashing EJB's or some kind of "Spring framework for all purpose" tool.
This book covers very important topics like Architecture (a vision from J2EE past and present), Lightweight containers and Spring (covering its principal features) and a "Sample App" to give us a very excellent example on using all the stuff. Great job Rod !
Rating:
Summary: Highly needed myth buster!
Review: Rod Johnson is doing a great service to the J2EE technical community with his books. This latest book is definitely a myth buster, that I was personally looking for.I will tell you right away that this is not an anti-EJB book
that tries to prove you a case against EJBs. This is not a
cheap "Spring" framework promotion book either. This is a very mature expert one-on-one advice that is well worth getting. Rod gives you a nicely rounded manual how to architect solid J2EE application using the latest and greatest practical solutions available both through the open source and JSR community. He propagates two extremly important ideas:
Lightweight containers and (simplified) Aspect Oriented Programming. Moreover, ha makes a very strong case for the application of Inversion of Control principle (IoC) in your applications. If you are not familiar with IoC: I see it pretty much as a savior to a J2EE technology. J2EE grew incredibly big, complex and fluffy in the recent years, and is at risk of being outflanked by more simplistic .NET solutions.
IoC offers "back to basics" approach where you as a good OO architect focus on the solid business domain model without poluting it with the infrastructure code. Through IoC supporting methods (such as Aspects) you then externalize the infrastructural pieces (transactions, pooling, persitence, logging, auditing,...) that make you apps run in the enterprise environement. Rod's book gave me a very good basis for the creation of my own state-of-the-art J2EE solution and I am grateful for it. It is the best thirty-some dollars that I spent in the long time. One more thing, this book in NOT a re-write of his previos book "J2EE Design and Development". I have both and they are not the same. I think you have to have both on your bookshelf in order to get the full treatment.
Rating:
Summary: Great work, bloated book
Review: Rod Johnson's work has done a great service to the Java/J2EE community. It is great work in the right direction. Everybody serious in building good Java/J2EE software should read this book.
However, the book is a bit bloated with repeated similar critisms, comments, etc in many places of the book. Ironically combating bloatness is an important topic of Rod's book. I think it is time now to reduce book bloatness. Simplicity is much needed not only in software but also in books.
Rating:
Summary: really good guide for new j2ee guy
Review: this book is really good for j2ee developer getting started. i read it after university at first job and it help me with learning best practices.
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