Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I've only read the first two patterns, Session Facade, and Message Facade, but those two by themselves are worth the price of the book already.
Rating:
Summary: Must-have for Java programmers to do architecting
Review: If you don't already know the stuff in this book, you need to, if you wanna consider yourself a decent server-side Java developer. J2EE is a big space to get lost in, and the book helps to manage that complexity, as well as the hurdle of real-world development schedules and planning.
Rating:
Summary: A must own
Review: If you own the GoF "Design Patterns" book (and everyone probably should), you should own this book as well. Along with "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans", this book really helps illustrate how to get the most out of EJBs. And IMHO is much better written than DP.This book covers many common use cases. Covers architectural patters, inter-communication (data transfer) patterns, persistance patterns and much more. *Even if you don't use or like EJBs, you should look at this book.* If you aren't using EJBs, chances are you've already built mechanisms similar to an EJB application server to suit your business needs. This book will help you write and design better code, no matter how your client/business/data layers are implemented.
Rating: 
Summary: = * * *
Review: If you think "put the cereal in the bowl _before_ putting on the milk" is a "design pattern", and "put your left shoe on first" is a "best practice", this may be the book for you. If you like unfounded assertions used as a basis for non sequitur based proofs, this may be the book for you. I think this book could have some value to a person who can manage to ignore any use of terms like "pattern" and "best practice", and can manage to ignore the attempts at justification for using the approaches proffered, and ignore the attempts to explain why or when to use the approaches. This book has a lot of germs of potentially good ideas, which I think could help a reader to come up with better solutions to their problems than they would have come up with if they had not read the book. But only if they do not get too involved in the details or the ostensible justifications or motivations. Many of the ideas in this book are applicable to any distributed "enterprise" application scenario, not only EJBs. I think a better name for the book might be "Tips and tricks for using EJB". It may be worth taking a look at the book to see if the "patterns" seem interesting, and returning it if they are not. The information in the book is presented in a relatively clear and concise way.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read For J2EE Developers
Review: In EJB Design Patterns Marinescu pulls together an exceptional toolkit for J2EE developers. The design patterns are clean and concisely described. His idioms and architectural ideas make sense. Beyond the patterns and architectural content, Marinescu provides excellent Ant and JUnit examples and tips--something decidedly lacking in most J2EE development books. He has succeeded in building a book that should be valuable to any team developing EJBs. This is the book I've been looking for to give to EJB developers to start them off on the right course. I would also like to applaud Marinescu and The Middleware Company for their public review process on theServerSide.com. The feedback from theServerSide.com community made an already exceptional book even better.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to understand
Review: In my opinion, the main contribution of this book to the field of J2EE patterns (in this case, EJB patterns) in comparison with other books, is that this book describes each pattern with a very easy to understand style and illustrating the implementation with code examples. Good book !
Rating:
Summary: Darn Good Book
Review: It's darn a good book. The given patterns or also can be called best practices are shown in a clear format and standard way, thus it's easy to undersand and to refer to. The best things are they are real-life best practices that you'll be surely face it for any development with J2EE. It's worth your money for the knowledge that you gain from it. For those who have been developing J2EE applications, you may have found that some of the patterns that you are pretty common and you have been using it. But for those who started to delve yourself into J2EE. No question ask, this is a must have book for you.
Rating:
Summary: EJB Design Patterns Bible
Review: Just finished reading the PDF version of Floyd Marinescu's book... and can only say how enormously I enjoyed reading it. It is definitely a must-read and even must-have for anyone working in the J2EE field! What sets it off is not only the clear style used to present the patterns in Part One, but also the excellent Part Two on Best Practices for EJB Design and Implementation, which not only shows how to use the patterns in real projects but also how important it is to set up a proper development environment using tools such as Ant and JUnit.
Rating:
Summary: My favourite book among other EJB books
Review: One of the excellent real EJB story book
Rating:
Summary: A book that puts EJB in perspective
Review: The author of "EJB Design Patterns" acknowledges that EJB is a work in progress and this makes a lot of difference. In fact, it's only by approaching the subject as a volatile one that the author can often talk about issues related to previous EJB specifications and how they are addressed by the current one. Likewise, alternative proposals to solutions offered by the current specification are also discussed. Readers are invited to keep their minds open as the EJB specification, currently in version 2.0, is not mature enough. Just to give a couple of examples, Chapter 9 brings to the reader's attention the fact that a pattern broadly applied in EJB 1.x days, known as "Composite/ Aggregate Entity Bean", is no longer appropriate under EJB 2.0. Chapter 8, on the other hand, discusses a number of alternatives to entity beans, by far the most controversial aspect of the EJB specification. Since one of them is a competing technology from Sun Microsystems itself, there's a chance it will blend with or even replace entity beans in the future. Such an approach highlights the mutable nature of the EJB specification and helps the reader focus on what is really important: the concepts, strategies and patterns behind EJB. After all, learning how to design distributed applications is more valuable than just knowing how EJBs are built today. Tomorrow, there will be a different way, but software engineers will still be developing distributed applications. That's true, some patterns, like "JDBC for Reading", are actually workarounds to EJB performance issues. There are also those designed to handle open conceptual issues related to the EJB specification, like "Business Interface". There are patterns, however, which stand as proven variants of the classical GoF patterns, like "Session Facade". Overall, "EJB Design Patterns" manages to teach how to work with an ever-changing technology while exposing the reader to concepts which will outlive that technology as we know it.
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