EJB 3 in Action

This book goes beyond the call of duty in explaining EJB 3 concepts front-to-back in a thorough and organized manner. Light-hearted and an easy read, it is wonderful for brushing up your EJB 3 knowledge or just starting out with EJB 3.The Apress EJB 3 books simply shove jumbled code in your face without any real organization or plan. The authors of those books seem to think that it's OK to just let the code document the concept and mix-and-match concepts of EJB 3 at random. This book, however, provides a MUCH MUCH MUCH more thorough examination and takes the time to explain things in a simple (but not insulting) and light-hearted manner while not taking away from the thoroughness of the coverage. A wonderful feat, indeed.Clearly organized and built on a logical "piece-by-piece replacement" of your existing code/knowledge, this book clearly organizes the concepts and isolates them from one another until a thorough understanding is attained. Afterwards, the concepts are grouped together to show a "final" perspective showing the logical integration of what you have learned **UP TO THAT POINT** (cumulatively). This is unlike the Apress books that just lump it together and say "we'll explain it later... but only with more code."The minimal coverage of EJB 2 is also valuable. Seeing the evolution of the technology definitely provides a better understanding of why and how things were done without going into mass detail like the Apress authors do.The only thing the book lacks is a concrete, real world example. The auction site provided is a wonderful sample to follow, but is not easily translated to a complex, distributed, message-driven/SOA systems unless you have been working on them for a while already. My suggestion to the author, to make this a 5-star book, would be to trim the appendixes that talk about basic concepts like SQL and whatnot and instead provide a much more complex business scenario and example at the end of the text.

The book is well written conceptually. You can expect to learn everything ejb3 has to offer. Concept is the only thing this book is strife at. The book itself, however, is not very practical.If you need to be practical and understand every single bit of detail the author is stressing about, you will need to spend 30min to 2hour for each chapter on the accompanied source code.Do not expect the source code to be compatible on every version of ejb containers though. Take case for JBoss, the source code is configured to run on 4.24 which means for newer versions of JBoss, you are on your own.The accompanied code itself also contains documentation errors. Take case in Chapter 2, the instruction file 'readme.txt' is an exact replica of Chapter 3's readme.txt file, which means user has to do some investigation on the build.xml in the folder before he/she is able to run the application. For reader who doesn't know about apache ant, he/she will be left in hopeless wander or some research on apache ant.Every book written has an error, if you are a 'debugger' or 'investigator', then this book shall be an interesting read. It is never 'enjoyable' due to its verbose references.

In the following chapter I am going to say a few words of comment on the EJB3 in action book.I sooo loved the 1-star review of this book by Peter B. Bonem, who says the book is constantly previewing it's content, and retrospecting on what has been written. It's at least 4-5 times too many pages with respect to material introduced, the language is tedious at best, and the coverage of material is shallow. Editorial job hasn't been of the best quality either, there are shameful elementary school level errors in language here and there.I'm doing the practice exams from Oracle now for the SCBCD after having read this book almost entirely (which I consider an achievement in its own right), and it hasn't been too helpful - there are details in the test questions that haven't even been mentioned, let alone thoroughly covered.All that said, had I bought this book with different expectations, maybe I would've been more satisfied with it. Thus 2 stars and not just 1 (which was my initial mark) - maybe as a tutorial "ejb 3 for the dummies" this book would do almost fine, but as exam preparation it underdelivers completely. Shame I found it recommended for this exam study.Go read the EJB3 spec - way more readable, and free.This concludes what I had to say about the EJB3 in Action. I've said that I found the language level less than satisfactory, the content shallow and the book size/book content ratio insufficient.

This is THE book,  EJB 3 in Action , to learn EJB 3 and get up to speed to start using it in your projects right away! It covers all aspects of EJB 3 in details with enough readable code snippets that is both easy to understand and implement. I highly recommend this book for both beginners and intermediate developers equally. The only thing I didn't like about this book is its fluffy writing style. Its not concise or succinctly written. I believe contents covered in this 600+ pages book could easily be put together into 400 pages based on other technical books I have read in my 16+ years of career. But hey if you can live with that one oddity about this book go ahead and read it- you will not be disappointed!

I found that the book treats some important topics about EJB3 a little bit too superficially. However if you know nothing about EJB3, the book can help you get a good grasp of it.

This book is really good for startersI specially liked the migration section from EJB 2 to EJB 3 and the integration section with SpringIt's quite a big book though... i would rather have a workbook section (like in Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 from O'Reilly) instead of some appendixes. I found minor errors too...All in all 5 stars for a beginner

I bought and read this book as I wanted to learn about Enterprise Java Beans having only used Spring for Enterprise Java development up to this point. This is an excellent book for just that.It explains in a reasonable amount of detail what stableful and stateless session beans, message driven beans and entity beans are. After a number of chapters describing how to use session beans and a further chapter on message driven beans a large amount of the book is turned over to entity beans and the Java Persistence API. As a user of Hibernate I found going over a very similar API somewhat tedious in places, but I am sure this would not be the case for a novice ORM user. I also think Hibernate does it better.I found the general style of the book, although chatty, quite easy to read. Although the authors mention many of the areas where Spring has similar or even better functionality it is clear, as you would expect, that the authors favour EJB in all cases. Even when EJB is still quite heavy weight in comparison.My biggest criticism of the book is that it's more of a text book that a practical guide. Although the source code for the example application is available to download, it is not possible to put the application together just from reading the book and deploying an application to a container is handled very late in the book. If I was actually wanting to do some EJB development at this stage I would want to try things out and therefore having deployment examples at the start of the book would be paramount.

This book is pack full with information, not so much for the advanced programmer (though there are references to delve deeper into anything that interests you). Moreover it uses a bit of humour (which is a good thing) and the usual example of an e-shop (that might actually be the real life problem of many programmers). I was very satisfied by it.

This book contains a lot of information on EJB3 and JPA (there is a lot on JPA). The only thing I can complain about is this book's take on transactions - this topic could have been described in more depth.

Hi there, I bought this book hoping to learn EJB as a part of a web development process. However this book is very informative, it was not that much of help for me. The reason is that the book shows structure of EJB with implementation of annotations and connections to API, unfortunately it does not show its workings on real examples. There is an example application to be downloaded, which is to demonstrate the working of EJB but it failed to deploy on my Glassfish server, it took ma ages to figure out why and you can't really progressively build this application along reading the book because book's code examples are fragmentary and illustrative rather than instructive.I have experience of learning from step by step code development, building application, demonstrating principles of particular with how it works as you go along and I felt being on the ball all the time. That's not the case with EJB3. I try to sell it on...

Als ich mich im Jahr 2005 auf den SCBCD 1.3 vorbereitet habe, hatte ich von EJBs überhaupt keine Ahnung. Ich startete damals mit dem Buch "Head First EJB" und war begeistert, sowohl vom Buch als auch von der EJB-Technologie. Nach dem Lesen war mir völlig klar, wozu die EJB-Technologie geschaffen wurde und wie sie im Detail funktionierte. Als ich mich dann im Jahr 2009 auf den SCBCD 5 vorbereitet habe, hatte ich zwar auch keine Ahnung von EJB 3, aber die grundlegenden EJB-Konzepte waren mir nach wie vor vertraut, und so ging ich relativ entspannt an die Thematik heran, zumal man EJB 3 nachsagte, daß diese Technologie wesentlich einfacher zu handhaben sei als EJB 2, und wenn ich mir damals schon mit EJB 2 nicht schwer getan habe, dann würde mir EJB 3 erst recht nicht schwerfallen. Dachte ich mir jedenfalls.Irgendwie lag ich mit dieser Vermutung aber nicht so ganz richtig, denn beim Lesen von "EJB 3 in Action" konnte ich mich zwar davon überzeugen, daß manche Dinge in EJB 3 tatsächlich eine Vereinfachung gegenüber EJB 2 darstellten, aber das Lesen von "EJB 3 in Action" fiel mir wesentlich schwerer als damals "Head First EJB". Das liegt ganz einfach darin begründet, daß "EJB 3 in Action" wesentlich geschwätziger geschrieben wurde als seinerzeit "Head First EJB", welches die Konzepte von EJB 2 genial auf den Punkt gebracht hat. "EJB 3 in Action" bringt die Konzepte von EJB 3 leider nicht ganz so genial auf den Punkt, da es sich meiner Meinung nach in einer etwas umständlichen Sprache verliert, die mir persönlich nicht gefallen hat. Da gibt es zwischen EJB-Konzepten und der realen Welt hanebüchene Vergleiche, die nur wenig zum Verständnis beitragen, und ziemlich auf die Nerven ging mir die Tatsache, daß nicht nur jedes Kapitel, sondern auch fast jeder Absatz immer eine Vorschau bringt, was als nächstes besprochen wird, und manchmal gibt es sogar einen Rückblick, was gerade besprochen wurde. Ich brauche aber beides nicht. Was demnächst besprochen wird sehe ich an der Überschrift, und was gerade besprochen wurde habe ich ohnehin schon gelesen. Dies ist bei anderen Manning-Büchern zwar auch der Fall, und dezent eingesetzt wie bei "JBoss in Action" kann man als Leser auch damit leben, aber die Autoren von "EJB 3 in Action" haben in dieser Beziehung völlig über die Stränge geschlagen. Diese unnützen Wiederholungen wurden nämlich sehr exzessiv betrieben und dienen nur der Streckung des Buches, aber nicht dem tieferen Verständnis für den Leser. Bei manchen Kapiteln hätte ich das Buch am liebsten in die Ecke geworfen. "EJB 3 in Action" enthält viele Seiten, aber der Schein trügt, denn soviel Wissen, wie man aufgrund der Textfülle erwartet, wird nicht vermittelt, zumal die Texte sehr großzügig über die Seiten verteilt wurden.Dem Buch sei jedoch zu Gute zu halten, daß es einige recht interessante Abschnitte enthält, und vor allem bei den Praxistipps in der zweiten Hälfte dürften die meisten Leser einige wertvolle Ratschläge erhalten. Für den Einstieg ist es nur bedingt brauchbar, da dem Anfänger vieles konfus und schwerverständlich erscheint, und für den täglichen Gebrauch werde ich es wohl auch nicht oft heranziehen. Auf EJB-Security wurde leider so gut wie gar nicht eingegangen. Hier hätte ich mir ein eigenes Kapitel gewünscht. Der Platz dafür wäre dagewesen, wenn man die ganzen sinnlosen Zusammenfassungen weggelassen hätte.Ich weiß zwar, daß dieses Buch in der Javaranch sehr gelobt wird und als DAS Referenzwerk für den SCBCD 5 gilt, aber ich kann mich dieser Meinung nicht anschließen und bevorzuge stattdessen die Bücher "Pro EJB 3" (Apress) und "Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0" (O'Reilly), die auch dem täglichen Einsatz in der Praxis standhalten.