This is NOT a book for beginners who wish to learn JSP/servlets and EJBs and the techniques of J2EE. On the other hand, if you already have some knowledge with these techniques, the book may help to improve your background of J2EE and its components.

1.The strong points of the book are:

- the book does a wonderful job in explaining different key points of J2EE techniques especially at the beginning of each chapter; although the discussion sometimes becomes pretty vague and less clear at the end.

- the book's code examples use j2sdkee1.2.1, orion and jboss which are available for you free with unlimited time.

- the book looks quite impressive, 1600 plus pp. hardcovered.

2.The weak points of the book:

- all the code examples are fairly easy. In fact, too easy to do much help to the readers who need a better workout to pay attention to some key points of the techniques.

- Since only half of the book is devoted to really J2ee techniques, people who already experienced with jsp/servlet may find the other half of the book unecessary.

In conclusion, you may want to check this book out if you alread know jsp/servlet and j2ee( through the Sun's tutorials and examples and wish to have a better understand of this popular but pretty complex technique.

The content of the book is a great way for Java programmers to get an overview of the J2EE APIs and Java-based Web applications with reasonable hands-on depth. I can't say enough in that regard. More depth requires more specific books, but that's just due to the size of J2EE. However, the editing on this book is just short of awful. There are numerous typos and non-grammatical sentences. Part of this is obviously insufficient attention given to the writing of non-native speakers. The approach differs radically from chapter to chapter, ranging from elaborated regurgitation of the documentation (useful due to its experienced commentary) to teaching almost solely by example. In one chapter, the author's coding style is full of distracting peculiarities. If he were consistent in their use, it may not be so distracting, and his at time really strange departures from common control structure idioms leaves you guessing. If the chapter weren't so strong from an architecture and design perspective, you would wonder about his command of Java. All in all, I recommend this book as in introductory cram course on J2EE, but the Wrox multi-team approach broke down somewhat here.

As lots of wrox book, this book does provide some interesting information. UML diagrams are used for better explanation, design issues for JSP, using XML with JSP, how interface object, control object and entity object fit EJBs, JMS, Corba, Unit test, are all well explained.

However, as the non J2EE edition, the code still contains errors: for all the Primary key classes in examples of EJB, hashCode and equals are not defined, you have to add them yourself. There are errors for package names, for the example, in Chapter 20, Order and Product classes are defined in book.order and book.product classes, and other classes imported them from factory.order and factory.product classes. You have to change "book" to "factory" class by class manually!

They used jBoss and orion server to implement EJB examples, I am not against these two servers, but I think it may be better to test the examples with Weblogic as well, since it is the most popular application server, they did not. And they never mentionned Weblogic in the book, not even in the appendix.

In split of all these errors, there is no serious error, this is a good and interesting book.