Customer Reviews

Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1

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

 

 

Here is why i did not like this book:

* Code snippets alongside text (in many examples) do not exhibit the concept under discussion completely. This alone was a show-stopper for me. I (and i assume others) do not want to go through a 500 line example (in appendix or companion code) to understand a concept
* Coverage on session beans could have been more exhaustive
* Coverage on message driven beans is awesomely bad
* Coverage of "Queries, Criteria, JPA QL" does not cover Criteria API. Or wait a second, maybe it does cover it but without specifying the word "Criteria API" in the text, ever!
* Mistakes in code/xml at many places, looks like released in haste before a stringent review was done (I know that errata is there, but should ...)
* The text is not structured in an intuitive way. "A summary of topics to come at start and then going deep in each topic" is not followed. At times, one has to read through the full chapter to make out the possible ways of doing something by himself/herself
* Written by different authors clearly evident by their different writing style. Publisher should have facilitated (if not enforced) some uniformity to the content style
* Could have been under 450 page book. Putting all the code in appendix doesn't provide much value when the companion code is available, just makes the book more bulky (and costly?)

I will not recommend this book to anybody. It is saddening to see an O'Reilly book of this standard.

--Nafees

The first pom doesn't build at all, after going through much trouble to get to the source of its companion codes. That didn't inspire me to buy this book.

The writer for 6th edition didn't know how to use computer when first edition went out.
He was given the task to update 5th edition with EJB 3.1.
The book is very poorly written, with extremely ugly and inconsistent code examples.
Not recommended!

Only 400 pages out of 738 is real content, topics could be explained better and those wasted pages could be used for that instead of code samples... Criteria API is not even mentioned in Criteria API chapter!!! Now thats disrespectful to readers who paid for this book... Especially when Criteria is pretty big addition to JPA2. Anyway don't buy this book.

Drowsy (1/5). Recommended if you have sleeping disorder. Believe it or not, couple of times I used to read this book wantedly when I don't get sleep and in 10 minutes I get into deep sleep mode.

I got this book thinking to upgrade my knowledge base from EJB 3.0 to EJB 3.1 and from JPA 1.2 to JPA 2.0. I could have easily done this by googling, but wanted to choose a reliable source. The fact is the book completely missed to cover the new additions in JPA 2.0.

The author develops example application in each chapter to explain the topic. The examples are so complex and irrelevant to the topic making the read difficult rather than helping. For instance, he uses encryption/decryption algorithm to explain stateless session bean. He also printed the whole example application for each chapter in the appendix. With no heart the last 400 pages out of 750 pages is dumped with code. Will someone print 400 pages of code in this digital world? Rather than making the example easier for the reader the author has taken this as an opportunity to exhibit his programming intellectual.

I recommend "EJB 3 in Action" instead of this book and learn the new additions in EJB 3.1 by googling.

This is a good book to learn EJB 3.1. Relevant code is highlighted to make it easy for you to spot.

A very clear and thorough book covering everything you need to no about writing modern Java Web applications with EJB 3.1