by Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra
Published by O'Reilly

Review by Monal Daxini

This is a review of Head First EJB in comparision to the other two books on EJB: Monson-Haefel's EJB-3rd ed and skimmed over 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:

The website for the book looks more oriented towards marketing stuff: selling T-Shirts and other stuff having images from the book imprinted on them, which put me off. The biggest thorn was that the code provided is very minimalistic. I expected to see better examples. Hence the 4 stars.

Missing info from all three books:

• 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:

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 are comprehensive.
• Practice, practice, and practice with these examples on at least two application servers:
  • the reference implementation
  • 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 EJB's fit in the picture.
• Must look at XDoclet, Middlegen, AndroMDA, and Hibernate.
• Consider reading Bitter EJB by Bruce tate and EJB Cookbook by Ben G. Sullins et al.
• I strongly recommend reading "EJB Design Patterns" by Floyd Marinescu, which is available at theserverside.com for free.