Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB

Rating:
Summary: Good but rather repetitive
Review: This is a J2EE good book for software architects and senior software engineers aspiring to be software architects.

This is the second book in a series of 3, the first being Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Programmer to Programmer) and the final being Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework.

While the promises of J2EE have been busted long ago, this book clearly articulates why and better still, suggests reasonable and sound alternatives.

I find it repetitive in most areas; some people may feel repetition drives home the message, but it just gets tedious for me.

And although the bookcover promises to be more code intensive, I find it not to be. But then again, this is a book about architectural decisions and solutions for J2EE; and not about how to program.

Rating:
Summary: a rare insight in J2EE problems and emerging solutions
Review: This is an excellent book for those software developers who strive for technical excellence, those who are trying to achieve at least three things simultaneously in one project: (1) clean, extensible and easy to understand design, (2) simple, easy to maintain code base, (3) good performance of the resulting software.

The two Rod's books help to choose the right tool for the right job by giving an expert overview of the available technologies, tools, and applicable design principles and patterns. Any software architect/developer who is a perfectionist and who tried to evaluate more than one tool or design solution for one problem, to find the most suitable one, will know how difficult it is, and will appreciate author's time and effort to share his knowledge. Like the first Rod's book, it's a breadth of the fresh air after so many serious official books (packed with childish useless examples nevertheless) that ignored the prominent open source projects which were in direct competition with the official technologies.

To me, a true professional in software design is the one who can come up with the simplest design, and implementation, and the smart choice of tools and technologies for the given problem. But unfortunately, it's common to see projects with unjustified design decisions, wrong (done without any analysis) choice of tools and technologies, - sooner or later this leads to financial failure of the project due to maintainability and performance issues.

This book does a good job of educating software developers not to take officially supported technologies for granted - they have failed anyone who used them mindlessly, but to carefully analyze what is important for the given project and what available choices are, and then make an informed decision.

Rating:
Summary: Repeated materials from Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and De
Review: While the book is well written, many materials were already covered in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Programmer to Programmer)

The remaining 50% is mainly from the framework reference document and can be downloaded free from the project site.