Customer Reviews

EJB 2.1 Kick Start (Sams White Books)

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

 

 

This book has discovered a completely new way of testing your knowledge. Instead of having complicated questions at the end of every well written chapter, you are tested as you read it. Most tutorials make it too easy to just cut and paste code into your editor and compile and see the results. This does not work with "EJB 2.1 Kick Start". If you try, you will find your code will never compile. The way to read this book is as follows:
1. take a good pen.
2. read every page carefully and try to work out the inconsistencies between what the code in the book says, the diagrams that illustrate the code say, the text says about the relation between the two, and what the code from the CD rom or the web site does. You cannot assume that either of those is correct at any one point. Watch out for diagrams that are misnumbered.
3. mark these inconsistencies in the margin on the side of the text, with your best guess as to what is correct. Use a pencil, you may need to revise it.
4. Try out these guesses by running the application with your attempted improvements.
5. It does work, but don't give up too easily. You may need another book, to help you through the difficult passages.

You should be able to find an errata on nearly every page. If you do this carefully, you will understand EJB's well, and you will also be able to use this experience to get a job as editor.

One has the feeling that the author sent a preview version of his book to the editor, who then sent it immediately to be printed. Their web site has no errata for this book.

I was thinking of putting one up myself, but then that would make it too easy for you cheaters... :-)

I was impressed by author's style in the begining chapters but I gave up after chapter 3 as I could not get the code to work. I could compile the BookBean EJB but I get plenty of errors(for the client code) even after following the instructions verbatim.

What's the fun reading the book when you can't run the code?

I hope author puts an errata on his website.

I purchased this book because of reviews I read about it. I thought it would be perfect! That was until I went to the publisher's website to download the source code. The UML models were not part of the source code. (Nowhere to be found on the website.) I sent three emails asking where to find them and they have yet been answered for more than a month now. I downloaded the errata for the book. A 45-page pdf file of corrections and omissions for the first 80 pages of the book. I am returning the book for a complete refund.

I have been programming in Java for about 4 years, but this is the first year that I have had to do any EJB stuff. I picked up this book because it is short (~370 pages) and has a lot of code snippets. I found it a very good read. It focuses more on the way in which somebody can use EJB, rather than the low-level details of exactly how EJB is implemented.
I recommend this book, but I will warn you that you will probably want to pick up a more detailed reference manual to go along with this tutorial-style book.

This book looked very good in the bookstore. It appeared to give a complete set of EJB examples for both the Sun reference EJB server and BEA Weblogic 7.0.

Unfortunately it doesn't carry out it's promise on either count. The book gives a good overview on how to configure Weblogic to run the examples, and it is only when you download the examples zip file that you discover that the Weblogic-specific deployment descriptor files aren't anywhere in the download. That would be enough to make it a 3 or a 4 star book, but then I tried running through the examples under the J2EE reference server, which the book is really meant to cover. First I discovered some minor problems with the code, no big deal. But then the first example (Chapter 3) will simply not work. At all. No matter what I did it would throw a naming exception. An email to the publisher (Sams) brought only an offer for a refund, but no satisfaction. I spent 2 days trying to make this work, and no dice.

Very sloppy work both on the part of the author and (particularly) on the part of the publisher (Sams). I've now been through two of their books and neither was complete. I'm beginning to believe that Sams may deliberately publish bad books. After all, if the first book solves your problem then they cannot sell you another?

This book is highly repetitive and focuses way too much on a single example project throughout the book. Instead of starting off with an overview about the technology and iteratively getting more detailed, information is organized almost like an API spec. The first few chapters were written in an interesting and exciting manner, but it was disappointing beyond that.

I had high hopes for this book when I found it. Like most others, I gave up after 3 chapters. I found too many defiencies in the code in the book so I downloaded the source from the publisher. That helped, then I found the classpath explained in the book had left out several items. Finally figured out the classpath issues, and got the code to compile fully, but was unable to deploy due to other defiencies so I gave up.

Some good points... It does explain EJBs well, just not how to deploy them properly. The exploration of UCs should benefit anyone. And it does show how to use deploytool, for whatever that is worth

Hello,

The book is easy to read. I used it to do the project at work with EJB entityBeans. I also use Web Logics there, and this book uses the Sun EJB server, so I had to refer to the Web Logics documentation too. I do recommend this book, though, because it explains EJB in a simple way.

Although there were a number of infavourable comments regarding the source code that accompanies the book, I feel that the concepts explained in the book are very practical and easy to be grasped.

Therefore, in my humble opinion, this edition of the book appeals more to software architects than source-code seekers.

I liked this book very much. It is just right for my level of EJB experience (beginner). I like the author's way of taking the reader through the entire development process from "good idea" to finished product.