I'm about to discuss the fact that this book is very tedious and lightweight.

This book is very tedious and lightweight. Everything (and I mean everything) in this book is foreshadowed with a comment about what they're about to say followed by a recap of what they said. Worse is the fact that the intervening material is frequently very shallow and cursory.

That concludes my brief discussion of how tedious and lightweight this book is. Next, I'll comment about how long it takes the authors to get to the point.

Earlier comments about this being a 100 page book expanded into some 600 pages are a slight exaggeration. But I'd bet good money that even I could compress the first 70 pages of this book into 7. That concludes my brief discussion of how long it takes the authors to get to the point.

Etc... Etc...

I recommend that you buy a different book. I will.

My company's library basically gives me access to all books I want, so I used to have a big stack of big EJB3 books on my desk. But during 2 months of daily work with EJB3 I often found this book helpful where others weren't and almost never found it the other way 'round. Only exception: Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (5th Edition) That book sometimes just has a broader coverage, delivering details that "EJB3 in Action" doesn't. But still, "EJB3 in Action" remains the best-understandable EJB3 book with (almost) the best coverage of topics. I have now returned all other books than the 2 mentioned here to the library, and I always look in this book first.

While I agree with Rob on the language issue, what counts is the result, and that is usually the best with this book.

I was not that enthusiastic about EJB at all during the EJB 2 era. Then I knew about the EJB 3 specifications and that made me read this book. I have to admit that after reading the book I became very much interested in EJB 3 mainly because of its removal of legacy EJB2 boilerplate mechanisms and the introduction of "Spring" like features. The book is very cleverly written and easy to read. The authors make every effort to make the readers completely engaged on the topic. Although I don't use EJB3 for my day to day work, this book clearly gave me new perspectives on how Java EE is driven going forward.

This is my third book on EJB 3.0 and in my opinion the best one. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Enterprise Java Beans and Java Persistence API.

I have been working with Enterprise Javabeans for many years. This really is by far the best resource to date on Enterprise Javabeans. One of the many strengths of this book is to show how the Springframework blends into the EJB framework. I have had a lot of success in blending these frameworks. The authors really believe in the EJB framework unlike another major author of EJB books.

This is THE BOOK for EJB 3.0. Covers everything about EJB 3.0.
Also outlines migration from EJB 2 and integration with ORM tools.
It's a highly organized and well written book.

A very nice and broad coverage of EJB 3 with a very simple and excellently crafted case study. The book starts very lightly on this complex subject and slowly dives into the details of advanced concepts like interceptors, transactions, security, JPA and performance issues. Of course developing each scenario with the case study. I like the idea of case study being simple and developing it based on complexity. Overall very good book with a very smooth read. I have it available on my reference desk helping me to deal with the issues of EJB migration, EJB 3 as web service and integration of EJB 3 with Spring framework.

I found this book to be a great introduction to EJB 3. The authors don't assume the readers to have any prior experience on EJBs.

The book provides no more information that its competing publications. It's tedious to read and it's hard to really understanding what the author is trying to get at certain times in the book.

It's got decent coverage, but it's very difficult to get through. I'd recommend checking out the other EJB3 publications out there and skipping over this one just due to its odd, impractical angles of looking at things and its difficult-to-get-through writing style.

The book is constantly previewing everything it's about to say. Let me give you an example. Page 108. These are 2 consecutive sentences in the book. The ... is only to omit the section heading.

"We'll close our discussion on session beans by outlining some best practices for session beans that you can use to build your application's business logic...In this section we outline some of the best practices for session beans that you can use while building the business logic tier for your application."

The whole stinking book is like this. It's around 650 pages. It should be about 100. Don't waste your time. You'd be better off just reading the Sun documentation.

The book is constantly previewing everything it's about to say. Let me give you an example. Page 108. These are 2 consecutive sentences in the book. The ... is only to omit the section heading.

"We'll close our discussion on session beans by outlining some best practices for session beans that you can use to build your application's business logic...In this section we outline some of the best practices for session beans that you can use while building the business logic tier for your application."

The whole stinking book is like this. It's around 650 pages. It should be about 100. Don't waste your time. You'd be better off just reading the Sun documentation.

EJB3.0 specification is like a gentle breeze in container managed object world. And this book is just one terrific one to read if you are starting on EJB3.0. The book does not assume any previous EJB experience and has explained the concepts in a simple to understand manner. Its a must have for both beginners as well for experienced programmers. Two thumbs up!

This book is informative but not well written. However, it looks like it's the best one on the market now devoted exclusively to EJB3 so I guess you'll just have to persevere. If you're looking for annoying manager buzz-phrases, this book is an "enterprise-ready", "mission-critical", "feature-rich", "out-of-the-box", "powerhouse" that addresses all your "up-front concerns". And if you like wasting time reading long-winded introductions telling you how much you're going to love a new technology and how revolutionary it is before you even know what the author is talking about, this is the book for you. Don't like spending time with your kids? You're in luck! You'll sacrifice plenty of your children's childhood reading about how the authors had to spend time away from their own kids. And just to make sure you don't suffer any sudden surprises, the authors are constantly giving you a preview of what they're about to write. However, just to keep a sense of mystery, they only partially explain what they previewed and leave you with another nail-biting cliff hanger. I'm on the edge of my seat. Don't know if I can wait until chapter 7. Just get to the point. I've got work to do.

I must admit that I was skeptical about EJBs after my experience with prior EJB releases. I wasn't even that convinced that annotations where a great improvement but I have to admit that I believe the EJB team is on the right track. I learned enough from his book to get a working prototype installed on my Mac Book Pro using Eclipse, JBoss, and MySql. Granted there were some minor differences in the annotations on the JBoss side but if you came away from prior versions of EJB with a bad taste (as I did) I'd say give this book a read. I had embraced Spring as an alternative but now am looking at EJB3 and annotations. If you think that EJBs still might be in your future this is a pretty good book.

Great book, for learning and as reference. Has many good examples, limited to the really useful and necessary. I'd recommend it as the base for learning EJB 3.

This is my second book on EJB3 and I would recommend it to anyone trying to learn about this technology.

As many of you, I was and am very skeptical about EJBs. They have complicated the enterprise world and haven't really delivered on their promise. Now there is EJB3. When starting the book, I just had one question: Did they "fixed it". After reading this very convincing book, my tentative answer would be: Yes.

"EJB3 in Action" is an easy to read and easy to understand introduction to EJB3. The book doesn't require you to know too much other topics and starts from the beginning. It starts with giving an overview of everything and then from there moves into the different bean types. From there it'll just in the more advanced topics.

One of the things I really liked about the book is that it really tries to answer the questions which I think much of the readers have. Questions like: Why would I use EJB3, I just stopped using EJBs. Can I combine EJBs with spring and how? These are exactly the type of questions people will want answered.

I'm not a EJB expert at all. However, I found the book easy to read and enjoyable. I've learned a lot from the authors while reading the book. I'd recommend it for everyone who wants to know more about EJB3. Great job!

I bought this book since I needed a good introductive book for the ejb3 world in order to get quickly up to speed with all the techinicism.

The book is quite complete, well written, with good examples. It is a very valuable tool to enter the ejb3 world.
The only flaw of this book is, in my humble opinion, the fact that quite a few times advanced topics are explicitly deemed as being out of the scope of the book. I mean, I was expecting that, but anyway I felt a bit delusional since the book was very good.

To summarise, if you want to get a grasp on the ejb3 world quikly I am pretty sure this is the book for you.

"EJB 3 in Action" manages to be an excellent read for both people new to EJB and people who have been using EJB 2.X. There are side notes throughout about significant changes from EJB 2.X. For larger topics that someone new to EJB 2.X might not know, the topic is covered in the appendix. The examples are interesting and well written, so it isn't boring reading about the purpose of a session bean if you already know it.

What really impressed me were the differences between this book and Sun's J2EE tutorial. The majority of examples used Java 5 syntax (for looping and the like.) This made the examples feel like EJB 3 examples rather than an old book robotically updated. Further, the authors explain when to use a deployment descriptor vs annotations. Sun sticks to the party line and barely mentions the deployment descriptor. The "EJB 3 in Action" approach is much more useful for gaining practical advice.

Best practices are described throughout. The authors don't assume you know Java 5 features and explain them as necessary. All the expected topics are covered. Additionally, there are chapters on Spring integration and migrating from EJB 2.X. The examples are app server agnostic, but they show you how to use one in the appendix. Finally, the appendixes provide an excellent reference for both the annotations and deployment descriptor.

If you want a book for a complete look at EJB 3 - THIS is the book! I have looked at aeveral other EJB 3 books and I find this one does a outstanding, complete and thorough job of looking at this very powerful implementation of EJBs. It is a very easily readable book that takes the reader from the basics through advanced issues in deployment and the creation of Web Services. The format of covering each type of EJB and following this discussion with Best Practices I find quite useful and informative. The discussion of ORM, JPQL, Entity Manager is well handled and quite clear. The section on the various aspects of deployment is well handled as are the various issues of how to use/reference EJBs from all tiers in an app server.
In summary I feel this text does an excellent job of looking at the EJB 3 specification and covers virtually all aspects of their use.