Customer Reviews

Beginning Java EE 5: From Novice to Professional

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was published too early. By that I mean, Java EE 5 was not finalized so the code examples starting in chapter 9 don't work. Another example is chapter 10 titled EJB Entity Beans. According to the Sun tutorial, Entity Beans have been replaced by the Java Persistence API.

The book is very good until you reach chapter 9, i think the authors made this book with a no ready version of ejb 3.0 spec's.
When i tried to run the examples i couldn?t. I prefered to start the jboss ejb 3.0 tutorial and i think im going to give just a glimpse to the
next chapters to see if something works.

It was good... until chapter 9

I bought this book to update my self on Java EE 5. However when I come to Chapter 9 and I try to run Jboss session bean samples it seems that things have changed since the moment they wrote the book. And I'm sure specification of EJB3 and JBOss will change until final realease.

I wrote to the authors but I never had an answer to my questions, so it did the experiencie a little bit more frustrating.

I learnt not to buy books of things under development!,

Beginning Java EE 5: From Novice to Professional (Mukhar and Zelenak) covers most of the J2EE; though, admittedly, it is impossible to do a comprehensive study in one volume. The authors do a good job of hitting the major components.

The EJB section is great, covering the three types of beans with concrete examples. Both stateless and stateful session beans are discussed. CMP and BMP entity beans are discussed. EJB QL, EJB relationships and EJB Design Patterns are captured.

The format of the book is carefully crafted. It builds on previous topics and is written according to a multi-tier architecture. It starts with the front end (JSP/JSF); moves to the middle tier (Servlets and Session beans); and, finally, concludes with the back end (Entity beans and JDBC). The book ends with system interaction and services (MDB and Web Services). There are helpful examples throughout each chapter with additional exercises at the end.

The book falls short in a few areas. It covers JDBC, but there is not much detail about the new Java 5 result set changes. Similarly, there is explanation of JMS in the MDB section, but the book does not go in depth. It does provide a good introduction to both MDB and JMS, however, with a single example. Additionally, it is light in the development of the Java API for XML (JAX). Details of these topics are probably better placed elsewhere; do not expect them in this volume.

In my opinion, books of this type tend to be dry and dull, but in Beginning Java EE 5 there are some great bits of humor that do not detract from the content.

There is certainly much to learn from this book for both the novice and the aspiring professional. It will provide a great start for the beginner, as well as give the experienced Java developer much to consider.

I bought this book to learn the newer concepts introduced as part of Java EE 5. This book did'nt meet my expectations, the example code described in the book has already been deprecated and just don't work on Glassfish. The code on the book may be tested to use beta version of Java EE5 reference implementation ! I could'nt figure it out.

The material in the book was thorough and detailed, and I appreciate the coverage of Tomcat, as we did not use JBoss in the course for which I used the book.

The presentation lacked somewhat, though. For instance, the program and web page examples that are given are listed, page after numbing page, with little commentary, then at the end of the listings are notes about the salient points of each listing. One has to flip back and forth to connect the comment to the line of code. To make things worse, there is nothing to visually set apart lines of code that demonstrate the ideas developed in that section from the numerous other lines that hardly changed, so locating the line referred to by the commentary is quite difficult. At one point I even missed critical information about a new concept; it was buried within a paragraph, with no highlighting or emphasis, and was very difficult to find while I was reviewing.

The attempts at humor were only mildly amusing; they could have been omitted

Perhaps the author, in subsequent editions or other works, could consider some of these enhancements.

This book was a plethora of useful knowledge. However, it wasn't a jump in and get dirty type of title. When starting the path towards EJB/J2EE coding, one needs to do less messing around with devshed pre-coded examples, and learn by doing.
This text references proprietary JAR packages from the authors. It is my feeling that APress let down the beginning J2EE/EJB programmer here. This book is not for the beginner java programmer -
Repetition goes far when learning a new area of any language.

Bottom Line:
If you want to get up and go and are good at installing all the pre-defined jargon (or are highly skilled with guesswork) and just want some great examples, this book is great for You. If you prefer the repetition route, look elsewhere.
- Hope this helps.

The effort was made to cover too broad a material. As the result, explanations are often superficial and missing the point.

Not happy with this book. The author does not provide enough details on environment configuration, unless you use JBoss. I would stick to Core Servlets by Marty Hall.

The used book arrived in a reasonable amount of time and in good condition. I will continue purchasing products from Amazon.com and this book retailer.