Customer Reviews

J2EE 1.4: The Big Picture

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book reminds me of Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates' Head First Books. Cute easy to remember monikers. Just like the title says "the big picture...", and that's what they deliver! A very nice broad coverage of J2EE technology and concepts. If you don't have a clue what J2EE is about, they do a wonderful job of easing you through it without any code samples. The book is not at the level of Head First Series but the topics were nicely broken down, with a casual informal style of delivery and plenty of illustrations and pneumonics. For a small book, it has a lot of info.

You know how most java books go from Hello World directly to Now Write Your Own Banking System From Scratch?
Not so here. Haugland & co. illuminate the concepts crucial to understanding this new revision of the language so you can actually make use of the platform without spending forever wading through code samples.
It will make your job easier.

I am a nongeek in the J2EE world and have finally found a book that tells me what I actually need to know. I feel I have a much better grasp of J2EE, EJBs, Jsps, and so on now that I have The Big Picture. There's a lot of good high level information on the point of J2EE, the "from the beginning" rationale that doesn't get enough play. There are some code
examples showing how you put together EJBs, some examples of JSPs and servlets, but in general the book doesn't go off the deep end with too much technical detail. (Which is where the other books lose me.) There is also a very informative chapter on Web services that a nice explanation of how they work, plus what they're good for and some disadvantages.

Whether you are an expert in Java or not, this book will tell you what exactly you want to learn and know about J2EE.

This is a must have book for anyone who is working as a Java programmer.

You will learn all the J2EE concepts, which you will not get even if you go for a 3-day intensive training on J2EE.

I very much enjoyed every chapter of this book even though some topics have been repeated. This book explains all the components under J2EE in a very simple but effective way. Each chapter also has a brief summary of what it's going to cover and its also addressed well later. Java Server Faces is not covered.

Best book to buy and read when you have free time or on the journey.

This book does an excellent job of introducing the higher level concepts and guidelines of J2EE architecture. It's well written, clear, accurate, and welcoming. I've already bought copies for friends.

Technology is a nasty business that revolves around inside secrets, secret handshakes, winks, nods, and superiority complexes, and it manifests itself as acronym soup cooked up by people who have more Star Wars action figures than real friends. Thank GOD for this book, I say. It gives you brilliantly clear (and necessarily simple) explanations of J2EE concepts and shows how all the pieces relate to each other. What's even better is that the book gives you a mental framework to catch and categorize the perpetual deluge of acronym soup being dumped on you. I know the concepts will even help me understand the pieces of (dare I say it) .NET once I dive into that mess. If you're gonna spend even 5 more minutes in the software world, you owe it to your own sanity to get, read, and share this book.

And yes, it's funny, but not in a distracting way. I mean, come on. Even if you don't share the same sense of humor, anybody who doesn't appreciate some kind of lightness in the face of something like J2EE needs to just lock themselves up in their room and play with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewy.

Sun does a lot of things right with their Java products, but one thing they do wrong is in how they name their versions of Java. J2EE 1.4 is an environment that allows you to do very many things. Short for Java 1.(2) Enterprise Edition, it is a set of tools used to write large, distributed applications, although from the name, it is hard to discern that fact. Since distributed applications have many parts, simply understanding how those parts can be put together is a major undertaking. This book is designed to give the reader a broad overview of J2EE, the various components and what each is used for.
There is very little code in the book. What does appear is skeletal and easy to understand. The premise is that Antoine is starting an online gourmet pizza business after being successful in selling locally. His online component is wildly successful and before long he realizes that he must scale his online business dramatically upward. The current structure of his website does not allow for rapid and efficient expansion, so his online business is in danger of collapsing under the weight of his success.
The book is designed to be an overview of the different ways the components of J2EE can be used to create an application server. It is not in any way meant to be an in-depth technical manual, the goal is to explain the components of J2EE in a way that non-technical people can understand. That goal is successfully met, there is never a time where the authors rise to a technical level beyond that of someone who understands how software operates.
If your goal is to learn the overall use of J2EE in creating large distributed systems, then this is the book for you. However, if you possess some technical knowledge, then it will probably not be interesting or challenging.

The book is full of "cutesiness" which makes the book much longer than it need be.
Conversely - what the book lacks is a good solid explanation, with detailed examples, of basic elements of J2EE like the Home_interface Component/Local/Remote interface - and how they actually tie-in with the Clients and RDBMS. It's not that these things aren't mentioned. They are. For example chapter12, p.148 :
"The Home interface is kind of like a hostess at a restaurant. In fancier restaurants you don't find your own table and order your food directly from the chef; you ask the hostess to find you a seat and the hostess assigns you a waiter who talks to the chef.You ask the waiter for your food".
Followed by 8 pages containing some codes and and explanations - that don't really explain how you connect everything together.

So in conclusion - if what you want is to know the buzz-words, the book is to long.
If what you need is technical detail beyond a long explanation why J2EE is like a fancy restaurant,
and that: "The database just sits around holding data. Sometimes it hums snatches from Broadway musicals softly to itself but mostly it doesn't do much. And that doesn't do anyone any good. like a library without a librarian" (p.159)
- than this book is disappointing

This is quite possibly the worst book ever written. I've actually not finished reading it, and probably never will; I've tried three times, but end up putting it down after 20 pages every time I pick it up. I recently brought it on a plane trip with me so I had several hours with it, but it's just not possible to get very far. You truly have to suspend disbelief while reading this piece of garbage: "Are they really writing this? Doesn't Prentice Hall use editors? Or at least some sort of grammar check?"

Every aspect of technology has been personified or anthropomorphized. The Dolphin is constantly talking to the Statue of Atlas who in turn talks to the Golden Retriever, but they only explain once that the Golden Retrieve equals the database server, so after five pages when you've forgotten that fact none of it makes any sense any more. You literally need Cliffs Notes to decode what the authors are talking about. All the "characters" talk to each other, with dialogue and everything. And the dialogue is AWFUL. If you can't write poetry or prose, then why bother writing a little play between the web serving Bee and the web containing Horse? Reading terrible writing is surprisingly distracting. Midway through trying to comprehend a concept the authors cut away to an example where the Scarecrow says something unbelievably stupid to the Cowardly Lion and all you can think is "how did this make it into the final draft?" Congratulations: you just wasted the last five minutes of your life, and you have nothing at all to show for it. (Aside: they actually use the characters from the Wizard of Oz to represent some concept, but the analogy is so flawed that they literally take several sentences explaining how the Tin Man represents Resource Management. You will never get those three minutes back, and you will be dumber for having read it. Shouldn't an example metaphor whose purpose is to illustrate a point be somewhat obvious?)

This book is 90% filler and 100% poorly written. I just cannot figure out who the target audience is. It is not for anyone remotely technical. Anyone who is functional and has risen to a managerial role is probably too busy to deal with the ridiculousness of the book. But if you do have the time to wade through this disaster and are simple enough to appreciate this mess, then how could you possibly need to know about J2EE? Who are you people that gave this book five stars?!? What companies pay your salaries?!?

I'm reading this book and learning concepts like what a JSP is. To me, the JSP serves the same purpose that my PHP, HTML, mySQL website does. JSP is like the HTML page that has PHP scripting built into it.

The book though repeats itself over-and-over again. I would rather have this book in the style of the Visual Quickstart books. This book should be much shorter.

Some things are just silly like likening various parts of the J2EE platform to the characters in the Wizard of Oz. Brains, Courage, and Heart?

There is little technical content as advertised, but there could have been more. There was one page that I read that tells how to graduate into technical material from the web.

It seems that as I go, there is more technical material, but I really don't like to have to be spoon-fed the stuff that I have already read repeatedly. I have to read the repetivie stuff to get to the more and more technical stuff as I read the later chapters.

I'd rather have a book that I could highlight the main points and vocubulary and concepts and review them myself. I learned in a book called "How to Study in College" that rather than reading the same stuff over and over that if you actively study yourself, you learn more.