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Rating: 
Summary: Very helpful hands-on guide to new EJB developer.
Review: As a Java programmer new to EJBs, I found this book very helpful in learning the EJB 2.0. First, on the upside. I really liked the layout and the flow of the book and the complete step-by-step guide including the deployment steps with plenty of screen-shots were very useful in learning new and complicated concepts in EJBs. I also liked the fact that the author used the Sun's Free J2SDKEE 1.3 server since the disk and memory requirements are very resonable and the installation so easy that it makes starting the learning process a bit easier. Compared to commercial application servers that take 100MB and requre 512MB of RAM and not easy to install. I also like the way he deals with discrete EJBs, one at a time and then at the end puts them together as one application. I also liked the author's approach with starting slow and easy with introduction to J2EE and overview of EJB and the chapter on transaction and security in the advanced section of the book.
On the down side, the author at times is verbose. Even though the author discusses the code section in the chapters using code snippet, I wish he had listed the entire soruce code in each chapter or provided the complete listing of the source code at the end of the chapter or included a CD with the source code. But in all fairness, you can download the source code and installation instruction from the compaanion web site...I would have also liked to see step-by-step deployment instruction for Weblogic and Websphere application server.
BTW, being from the Bay area, I liked the author's sense of homour especially references he makes to the dot com boom just a few years ago.
In summary: So if you're new to EJB development and you prefer step-by-step guide on the development and deployment of stateless and stateful session bean, bean-managed and container-managed entity beans and message-driven beans then I am sure you, too will find this book very helpful as I have.
--dan
Rating:
Summary: As a EJB newbie, I found this book very helpful...
Review: As a recently unemployed Java developer, I was at a local Borders looking at EJB books to update my skill. I picked several EJB books and then sat down with a coffee to find a easy to understand and a practical book. In my opinion the EJBs are too complicated and I was looking for hands-on book with step-by-step guide and this book was it. I was able to understand and start writing stateless session bean within few hours. I liked the fact Mr. Tulachan used Sun's J2EE Reference Implmentation, which is free, small and easy to use unlike commercial application servers that take over 150MB of disk space and require atleast 256MB -a bit complicated and difficult to use for a beginner like me.
The only negative from my perspective are the typos so be sure to download the errata.
As a beginner I found the step-by-step approach to EJB development very helpful and I hope it will also help me get a job as an EJB developer soon....
--raj
Rating:
Summary: As a EJB newbie, I found this book very helpful...
Review: As a recently unemployed Java developer, I was at a local Borders looking at EJB books to update my skill. I picked several EJB books and then sat down with a coffee to find a easy to understand and a practical book. In my opinion the EJBs are too complicated and I was looking for hands-on book with step-by-step guide and this book was it. I was able to understand and start writing stateless session bean within few hours. I liked the fact Mr. Tulachan used Sun's J2EE Reference Implmentation, which is free, small and easy to use unlike commercial application servers that take over 150MB of disk space and require atleast 256MB -a bit complicated and difficult to use for a beginner like me.
The only negative from my perspective are the typos so be sure to download the errata.
As a beginner I found the step-by-step approach to EJB development very helpful and I hope it will also help me get a job as an EJB developer soon....
--raj
Rating: 
Summary: Could be a "must have", but...
Review: I wish the author spent more time on the quality of the book and its contents, as opposed to just getting it out the door for JavaOne. I found it really annoying when I downloaded the errata of the book, it needed an errata itself too....Even if you only want to learn the reference implementation (which is what most of the book is all about), you'll have to compile/deploy the examples by trial-and-error. Correction for most of the technical errors have not made it to the errata either.
Rating:
Summary: Don't rely on this book -too many mistakes
Review: I've used this book for several months now - and there are just too many mistakes in the text. Mistakes that will lead a J2EE component developer to make design/coding mistakes that will take a lot of hard work to figure out.
For example: page 217: Introduction to Entity Beans
"Rules for Implementing ejbFinder methods" ...
"The method must not throw the java.rmi.RemoteException"
Note: the NOT - wrong - it must declare that it throws RemoteException!
This is just one of many examples - and if you check the errata on the web site - it doesn't contain very many of the mistakes (not this one) so one is left with very poor misleading information.
Do technical books not get edited by technical editors? Demand better books - vote with you money - buy a different book! Or buy mine use - I'll sell it cheep!
Rating: 
Summary: A real Sun book on Java
Review: Reading this book is not a very pleasant experience. There are so many typos that I actually stopped reading after 1/3 of the book. I really do not understand how Sun can publish such a book. A little technical note (to justify the title). It does not really teach you great (or even average) insights into EJBs. No real techy info on what the consequences are of using CMP vs BMP (only info from the spec),... It basically is just a rehash of the spec. The examples are for the Sun reference implementation, which would not be that bad if it wasn't half of every chapter (I want to learn EJB not a how to use a reference implementation which is not made for running in production!). All the advantages of EJBs are straight from the Sun EJB marketing book. O yes one plus: it does mention EJB patterns.
Rating: 
Summary: For experienced developers...
Review: This book assumes that you have some development experience with Servlets, JSP's and OO methodolgies. The author explains things clearly and concisely, but was very dissapointed with all the typos - especially with the code snippets. It was very frustrating trying to learn while all the while wondering where the errata was. You can download an errata sheet, but the sheet still misses many errors. I agree with a previous review that not having complete source code listed in the book is a problem. As you are working with the examples - you need to spend time comparing what's in the book with the source code (which you must download). Again, this is a distraction and I found myself breaking away from concentrating on the tasks to jump around here and there to verify code. This could easily have been a much better book by simply including the code (perhaps in the appendix) and by minimizing the typos.
Rating:
Summary: A terrible book
Review: This book is probably one of the worst EJB book one can buy. It's short on theory and long on practical using Sun's J2EE. There are a lots of books better than this one. Eg "Professional EJB", "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans". Both of the above books is very good on theory. For more practical book "Sam Teach YourSelf EJB IN 21 Days" is much better than this book.? Why because it uses weblogic 7 for the practical. Even though it is also short on theory but at least it's exercises are usefull in the sense you learn how to use it in Weblogic 7.0. Lastly, I am writing these negative comments about this book because the more pages I read from this book, the more I felt I got cheated.
Rating:
Summary: A terrible book
Review: This book is probably one of the worst EJB book one can buy. It's short on theory and long on practical using Sun's J2EE. There are a lots of books better than this one. Eg "Professional EJB", "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans". Both of the above books is very good on theory. For more practical book "Sam Teach YourSelf EJB IN 21 Days" is much better than this book.? Why because it uses weblogic 7 for the practical. Even though it is also short on theory but at least it's exercises are usefull in the sense you learn how to use it in Weblogic 7.0. Lastly, I am writing these negative comments about this book because the more pages I read from this book, the more I felt I got cheated.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book but you need to have some background
Review: This is a very good book in that it explains everything in step by step manner. In the very beginning, the author mentions the background you need to have to be able to use this book and author means it. The reason this book lost a star is the explanation of the concepts in initial chapters. If you have absolutely no background in EJB, JNDI and RMI, you might have hard time understanding the concepts. The best feature of this book is that it explains (1) the concept, (2) how to write code and (3) how to deploy the code and test it. There are very few books that does all three (most of the time other books will say deployment depends on your application server). Another good feature is that this book uses J2EE RI. Many books use servers like websphere or weblogic, which requirs hi-fi hardware and of course availability of server. If you know what EJB is and ready to start writing code, go ahead and buy the book. Be sure to keep another reference (a good online article or Ed Roman's free EJB book) to read initial concepts and be sure to download code for this book (as this books saves space by NOT providing full code)
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