Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Programmer to Programmer)

Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies, Second Edition

Head First Design Patterns

Struts: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)

Java

Beginning J2EE 1.4: From Novice to Professional (Apress Beginner Series)

Format: Paperback
Author: James L. Weaver
ReleaseDate: February, 2004
Publisher: Apress
Rating:

Good introduction
I purchased this book and it was invaluable in breaking down concepts in an easy to understand manner. I was taking a college course using Wrox press pro to pro series book on J2EE and it was kicking my butt. The book is well written and a great introductory text to J2EE, I highly recommend it for anyone trying to learn this technology.

Excellent review of major J2EE concepts
NET developer, I had a good idea about system architecture overall coming into this book, but admittedly little in terms of concept that were specific to Java. Being a . I feel confident about developing dynamic apps with J2EE now after reading this work. It does a great job of introducing the major concepts within Java 2 Enterprise Edition (JavaServer Pages, Enterprise
JavaBeans, servlets, XML, web services, using a variety of appServers, etc. ).

The introductory chapters talk about installing J2EE, relating it to J2SE, and setting the all-important environment path variables. The examples are complete, with step-by-step instructions on coding, compiling, deploying and executing examples for console, desktop and web environments. It's not one of those books that is heavy on theory and light on pragmatic examples - the concepts are backed by real-world apps. Each example is also presented for execution in both the default documentation appServer for J2EE, as well as Tomcat. It's a nice mix that isn't married to one specific platform.

The authors enforce a strict usage tiered system design, and demonstrate how to move from simple 3-tier applications to MVC- and pattern-based n-tier architectures using complex components. On this note, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on developing EJBs, which were very healthy.

However, I thought the last two chapters on web services with Java, while helpful, were incomplete, specifically in the areas of developing multi-platform clients to access SOAP messages through JAX-RMI. I would have liked to see Swing/AWT utilities and JSP-based clients call not only Java web services, but also HTTP-SOAP services using . NET and other vendor platforms to reinforce the main advantage of decoupled distributed systems.

But nonetheless, I found this book to be a great help in my quest to get myself up to speed with modern-day Java development. I'm a better programmer for having read it, and I recommend you do, too.

Very well-rounded.
In fact, I believe this is my first review ever. Normally I'm not the type of person that puts the effort into reviewing a product online. However, the quality of this book motivated me to publicly declare my opinion and appreciation.

I've been a Software Developer for eight years, and Java only within the past year. Recently my company asked me to create an application, however this time I was to experiment with J2EE as the platform. I struggled through it, mostly via trial-and-error, javadocs, online tutorials, etc.

Then I dediced to get this book to fill in the gaps. It accomplished this task extremely well. I already knew around 60% of what the book contained, but the remaining 40% was extremely usefull. The explanations were clear and easy to understand. It followed a logical progression of topics.

What I appreciated the most about the book is the ability of the author(s) to satisfy the questions that would come up as I read the text. It's as if they put great effort into preparing for what the reader may be wondering as they read a description or example, and then answered these questions in the next paragraph. Even including the small details that would otherwise prevent me from effectively using the overall topic in the real world.

Where other books would suffice to say "This is what you do to make this happen," and maybe "This is why," this book goes the extra mile and says, "This is what happens in the background when you do this. " This is extremely usefull information when it comes time to creating a real application. It gives you the insight needed to make well-informed decisions on which methods, protocols, libraries, etc. to use. Not to mention debugging.

I also appreciated how they included step-by-step examples which were very well-done. They demonstrated the topic-at-hand, without getting too wordy and involved. The exercises were also thought-provoking.

Of course, I realize that good reviews should also include what negative things the reviewer found with the product. Although the positive far outways the negative, I did find some slight grievances. There could have been more exercises. Sometimes they repeated instructions which a competent reader should be able to do on his own after the first time.

That's about it. As far as complaints, they are hardly worth mentioning. If you are a fairly new J2EE developer, do yourself a favor and get this book!.