Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
they did it again, November 12, 2003
I passed my programmer's exam because i studied the other wonderful book produced by these two authors; sun's certified programmer book. It helps me to code better too. The certification definitely helps me to become a very competent java programmer.Having passed the first exam, I started studying for my SCWCD exam. But then after working with Jakarta Struts for a while, I don't know whether it's worth while to take the SCWCD exam. I surely hate the JSP snippets, it makes JSP pages unmaintainable. So, I seriously do not know how SCWCD will help me to do my job better. Dilemma! Dilemma! We're not in college anymore; hence anything we learn should be worth the money, time, and effort.
That's my humble opinion. Hence, i turn my attention to this book; I skimmed through it for the first couple of days and realize that this is the certification that I shoud pursue next; SCBCD instead of SCWCD. I look beyond the certification; the ability to program EJB to do a better job. Having intrinsic reasons to do something, for example learning the subject for the sake of the knowledge and implementation, is far better than having a piece of paper that says you are certified. I started reading the book and i honestly just cannot put it down. So far, the items covered in this book make a lot of sense to me; in terms of how i can use them to write better codes and design better EJB. I am a visual learner. Thus, the graphics in this book really enhance and expedite my learning process. When I read them, I understand the concepts instantly! Plus, they're funny. It makes the learning process very fun! Make sure you have some notebook and draw/sketch the important concepts. They help understand some complex points presented. All in all, for those of you who want to learn EJB but don't know where to start, this book could be your answer. You may not be going for the certification but the book will guide you through to make sure that you grasp all the needed concepts to become a competent EJB programmer.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great style, August 27, 2005
The authors take a complex subject and make it understandable through an interesting set of didactics - they have different ways (like posing questions and giving answers in a conversational style; using metaphors, etc.) of presenting material to enhance understanding.
The most complex part of the subject is entity beans whose methods are inconsistent with stateless session beans of the same name. I think after reading the book one needs to rethink even using entity beans for anything because of the overhead and complexity. I would really be concerned about performance so testing a vertical slice would be a necessity.
The real question at this time is whether you should learn and get involved with EJB 2 at all - since EJB 3 is destined to completely simplify the whole process - eliminate the home interface, ejb component objects, etc.
Using POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) to accomplish the same task is the strategy of the new light, non-J2EE standards based frameworks such as Spring. It's anticipated that EJB 3 will be very Spring like - whether they hide all the EJB 2 details under the covers or re-architect the whole framework (and hopefully get Spring like performance). There is also the whole notion (and nightmare) of testing your bean using separate containers that one should consider before embarking on the EJB 2 path. All in all, I enjoyed the book's style, and if nothing else, it will help you appreciate the simplicity (hopefully) of EJB 3 when it becomes available.
If you need to support legacy EJB architectures, this is the book to use to learn EJB 2. If you are architecting a new solution, wait for EJB 3, or better yet, look into the light weight non-standards based frameworks like Spring.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Book review, and recommendations for Mastering EJB, February 19, 2004
This is a review of Head First EJB in comparision to the other two books on EJB: Monson-Haefel's EJB-3rd ed and Mastering EJB by Ed Roman et al.I have been working with EJB's for 2 years and have devoured Monson-Haefel's EJB-3rd ed, and skimmed over Mastering EJB by Ed Roman et al. Recently when I looked at "Head First EJB" (HFE) I was hooked on from the first page. All these books essentially provide the same information and with similar organization. However, HFE is direct upto the point and drives the concept strainght in to the brain. This book employs engaging common sense techniques to teach, which unfortunately is not so common. It marks the beginning of a new style of writing tech books, the way they were meant to be written. This book achieves what it claims to achieve, and clearly states what it does not achieve. Although casual, the content is coherent, precise, conspicuous, and lucid. Thorns:
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- The website for the book looks more oriented towards marketing stuff: selling T-Shirts and coffee mugs having images from the book imprinted on them, which put me off. The biggest thorn was that the code provided is very very minimalistic. I expected to see better examples. Hence the 4 stars. Missing info from all three books:
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- No mention of .ear and how they are associated to .jar
- No mention of the fact that the Application Server specific ClassLoaders have implications on way ejb packaged .jar files are loaded.
- No mention of the application deployment descriptor application.xml and how it could be used with the ejb
- None of these mention that that for an EJB project to be successfully requires tools for easing developement, testing and profiling EJB's. Recommendation For Mastering EJBs:
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The best way to understand EJBs is by implementing them, and the website falls short of providing the necessary code. I would recommend the following to comprehend EJB's: - If you are a beginner begin with the Head First EJB
- If you can get hold of the Monson-Haefel's EJB-3rd ed, then read the first chapter, and also get all the examples
for this book for different application servers. These examples are excellent and comprehensive.
- Practice, practice, and practice with these examples on atleast two application servers:
* the reference implementation and
* weblogic 6.1, with J2EE 1.3 features, and comes with a one year developers license for free.
- Read the preliminary pages of the J2EE 1.3 tutorial on Sun website to get an overview of how EJB's fit in the picture
- Must look at XDoclet, Middlegen, AndroMDA, and Hibernate.
- I strongly recommend reading Bitter EJB, and "EJB Design Patterns" by Floyd Marinescu, which is available at theserverside.com for free. - Monal
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