Head First EJB

by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates

What do Ford Financial, IBM, and Victoria's Secret have in common? Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). As the industry standard for platform-independent reusable business components, EJB has just become Sun Microsystem's latest developer certification. Whether you want to be certifiable or just want to learn the technology inside and out, Head First EJB will get you there in the least painful way. And with the greatest understanding. You'll learn not...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596005717
• ISBN13: 9780596005719
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 700 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 8.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great style

The authors take a complex subject and make it understandable through an interesting set of didactics - they have different ways (like posing questions and giving answers in a conversational style; using metaphors, etc.) of presenting material to enhance understanding. The most complex part of the subject is entity beans whose methods are inconsistent with stateless session beans of the same name. I think after reading the book one needs to rethink even using entity beans for anything because of the overhead and complexity. I would really be concerned about performance so testing a vertical slice would be a necessity. The real question at this time is whether you should learn and get involved with EJB 2 at all - since EJB 3 is destined to completely simplify the whole process - eliminate the home interface, ejb component objects, etc. Using POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) to accomplish the same task is the strategy of the new light, non-J2EE standards based frameworks such as Spring. It's anticipated that EJB 3 will be very Spring like - whether they hide all the EJB 2 details under the covers or re-architect the whole framework (and hopefully get Spring like performance). There is also the whole notion (and nightmare) of testing your bean using separate containers that one should consider before embarking on the EJB 2 path. All in all, I enjoyed the book's style, and if nothing else, it will help you appreciate the simplicity (hopefully) of EJB 3 when it becomes available. If you need to support legacy EJB architectures, this is the book to use to learn EJB 2. If you are architecting a new solution, wait for EJB 3, or better yet, look into the light weight non-standards based frameworks like Spring.

different, excellent

At my first look at this book I thought it was a comic book, but then I realized it is actually a comic book, but also a good, sound introduction to EJB technology. Let's be honest.. how many of us are absolutely sick of dry, boring texts that try to sell you ejb technology and themselves as they were rocket science? Most computer related books nowadays are ridiculously formal and dry. Is this the way to attract the interest of students or new developers? I don't think so, and neither do the authors of this book. This text is both a good intro to EJB and an example of how to teach. So it will be useful for both the novice programmer and the expert one who is involved in teaching or mentoring. Be warned that this book is really "different" so if you are kinda stiff and find it disconcerting to have lots of images scattered along the textand like to concentrate only on the "essential raw matter" thismight not be the book for you. A fine example of the fact that only really serious people are not afraid of being funny...

An Engrossing Adventure in the Land of EJBs

Head First EJB is nothing short of phenomenal in a sea of mostly dry, uninspired, exposés of this very-involved subject matter. I teach all levels of Java including EJBs and advanced J2EE in a variety of advanced undergraduate software development courses to students at Purdue University. It is particularly challenging to motivate students to study and learn the intricacies of J2EE Architecture and Software Design, and its eventual deployment onto real-world Application Servers. Head First EJB stands alone in its treatment and presentation of advanced EJB concepts. This book rocks! I have always said that a bad teacher can take the most inherently interesting material and make it boring, but a great teacher can take the most inherently boring material and make it exciting.I have added this book as one of the required texts for future offerings of my advanced undergraduate "Enterprise Application Development" course.I congratulate the authors on this marvelous, highly-readable and enjoyable body of work.

Easy explanation of a complex subject

I got the opportunity to preview this book before its release. It was not like reading any serious EJB book, but like reading a comic book (with pictures). I am pasting this from one of my messages in some other forum. This happened while I was in the preview mode and was getting a chapter at a time. "I took the printout and went to my son's baseball game. Generally, when I take something to read with me (like any book on EJB), the game appears more interesting and I can't concentrate on my reading. However, last evening it was different. The material was so so interesting that I could finish reading all of it, in a breeze. One kid came to me and asked what comic am I reading. I was on the page with a lot of comic-style conversation between the provider, assembler and deployer going on."The best thing about this book is it is crystal clear in its explanation. It has a very logical flow which gives a deeper understanding of the subject. The difficult topics like bean life-cycles and associated interaction diagrams, system vs appl exceptions and how these are managed between container, bean and client, transactions/CMT and their propagation, persistence/CMP and EJB-QL have been made very clear. Important points have been reiterated many times to get them through our head. How the bean life-cycles/pooling/activation/passivation effects performance is explained very well. The sections like "BULLET POINTS", "there are no dumb questions", scenarios, summary, etc can prove very useful to clear the concepts and also if someone is appearing for an interview or the SCBCD exam. I find the certification books, in general, are good at clearing the conceptual nuances because that's what is asked in these exams. The mock questions are just superb. I wish I had this before my SCBCD exam; definitely it would have improved my score.Before reading this book, I went thru' Monson-Haefel's EJB-3rd ed book. That book has EJB1.1 and EJB2.0 strewn all over. I think if someone is interested in EJB1.1 vs EJB2.0 comparison kind of thing, that book may be good. Or may be useful for a EJB1.1 developer. With the EJB framework being way too complex with significant changes between 1.1 and 2.0, I found that book very very confusing. I would recommend the "Head First EJB" to anyone, from manager to a serious programmer. It should be used along with the EJB2.0 Specs during code development.

they did it again

I passed my programmer's exam because i studied the other wonderful book produced by these two authors; sun's certified programmer book. It helps me to code better too. The certification definitely helps me to become a very competent java programmer.Having passed the first exam, I started studying for my SCWCD exam. But then after working with Jakarta Struts for a while, I don't know whether it's worth while to take the SCWCD exam. I surely hate the JSP snippets, it makes JSP pages unmaintainable. So, I seriously do not know how SCWCD will help me to do my job better. Dilemma! Dilemma! We're not in college anymore; hence anything we learn should be worth the money, time, and effort.That's my humble opinion.Hence, i turn my attention to this book; I skimmed through it for the first couple of days and realize that this is the certification that I shoud pursue next; SCBCD instead of SCWCD. I look beyond the certification; the ability to program EJB to do a better job. Having intrinsic reasons to do something, for example learning the subject for the sake of the knowledge and implementation, is far better than having a piece of paper that says you are certified.I started reading the book and i honestly just cannot put it down. So far, the items covered in this book make a lot of sense to me; in terms of how i can use them to write better codes and design better EJB. I am a visual learner. Thus, the graphics in this book really enhance and expedite my learning process. When I read them, I understand the concepts instantly! Plus, they're funny. It makes the learning process very fun! Make sure you have some notebook and draw/sketch the important concepts. They help understand some complex points presented.All in all, for those of you who want to learn EJB but don't know where to start, this book could be your answer. You may not be going for the certification but the book will guide you through to make sure that you grasp all the needed concepts to become a competent EJB programmer.