Reviews

On Dec 6 Hildeberto Mendonca wrote: The best EJB reference you can find out there
The book is very comprehensive, making it work like a reference book. It even contains a whole part dedicated to the Java Persistence API (JPA), which we think it’s too much because there are so many details in JPA that it would deserve a dedicated book. That’s why we noticed this part of the book a bit superficial. Apart from that, the book is full of working code, the authors try hard to be vendor-independent and, of course, it’s a quality assured O’Reilly book. Full Review  >

Rating: 4.0

On Jul 11 Markus Eisele wrote: Good job in taking over such a piece of history and making it up to date!
Hard to judge on this one. Beside the fact that I have a personal history with this book, I still believe that is helpful to people which want to get a good and basic introduction to the EJB programming model. The clear separation from any appserver makes this only half as valuable than it could be. And this is the surprising bottom line. I still would prefer any vendor specific book over a plain technology focused one. Anyway, congratulations to Andrew for doing a good job in taking over such a piece of history and making it up to date. And thanks to O'Reilly for keeping traditions alive. Full Review  >

Rating: 4.0

On Jun 25 Santosh Shanbhag wrote: Better than the spec!
I was not a big fan of EJBs as the previous versions of the spec left me baffled and frustrated. I kept away from learning EJBs as not one at my work place seemed to care about them either. With EJB 3.1 there has been a renewed interest on this topic and so I started reading "Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition - O'Reilly". I think the authors have done a good job starting with the basics in the first section of the book explaining what the purpose of EJBs are and how the container takes care of providing services so we can focus on writing the business logic instead of re-writing plumbing and cross-cutting code. Section two of the book provides chapters of the book provide a coverage on the various types of beans with practical examples on when each is suitable to use. I really enjoyed this section of the book as I could relate it with my daily life as a programmer. Section three and four focus on Entity beans and Container services but I read them lightly as I don't have much interest in going too deep into those. Section five of the book wraps up with lots of practical examples (like recipes) on each bean type. I enjoyed reading this section of the book as well. Overall, I think this book is much better than reading the EJB 3.1 spec online and the authors have done a great job in bringing the spec to life with practical examples and simplified language. Full Review  >

Rating: 4.0