Rating: 
Summary: for people who don't know how to program
Review: If you need this book to learn jsp, servlets, jdbc, etc. you should look for a new profession. All topics covered in this book are available for free at java.sun.com. Unlike this book, Sun provides concise, clear examples and explanations. Only people who don't know how to program read Deitel books.
Rating:
Summary: abundance of not too useful information
Review: The authors of this book focused on volume while ignoring quality. The writing is verbose and unclear, making it painful to try to read this book. The authors don't seem to fully understand many of the topics. Perhaps that is why they give an overview of a topic instead of going into depth. I don't recommend this book at all.
Rating: 
Summary: What a developer really wants and great design
Review: This book is the best Advanced Java book I have found. For me a couple of year experienced Java developer this book is the best. The book focus on really to help you do something usefull with Java. For those chapters you already know something about you can read the great chaptersummaries to refresh your skills. I also love the design of the book. For the first time someone thinks of what a reader really wants reading about software developing. First of all I love that it's printed in color, second that there are rownumbers in all codelistenings which makes it's easier to go back while reading, third the great effort to visualise learning with great illustrations and screenshots. Last I would say that it's great that the book also give you help with tools also, and not just with code. Learning coding isn't enougth these days, code and tools together is the future.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Choice
Review: This book is worth buying! Loaded tons of useful code. I improved my JAVA programming by leaps and bounds. This book is not for a beginner. A good prerequisite is JAVA How to Program Fourth Edition. Both books are good!!
Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: This book was a text book for one of my advanced java classes. Unfortunately, there is very little to learn from this book. Filling the book up with pages of examples without sufficient explaination of concepts makes this book a complete waste of money. Most of the chapters were rushed, students will have a tough time grasping important concepts unless they buy some good books as well (OReilly, Addison-Wesley). I will not recommend it to anybody.
Rating:
Summary: Quantity is not Quality
Review: This book was the required text for a graduate class in Java servlets, JSP, and J2EE.The book attempts to cover all aspects of J2EE technology and in the process doesn't cover any aspect very well. Topics are covered in a highly condensed, concentrated manner. Unless you already know something about the particular technology, you're not going to get a good grounding in a topic. Most of the students in my class had problems making the examples work. (To be fair, the authors used a J2EE 1.2.1 while the class used J2EE 1.3.1.) Nevertheless, I think Deitel and company should have done more work on the examples. The typographical layout of the text makes it hard to read. Lots of paper is used to reprint source code in a mis-mash of color. The overuse of bold text makes the reading painful. The book weights a ton. For the topics we studied, the O'Reilly books Java Servlet Programming (Hunter & Crawford) and Enterprise Java Beans (Monson-Haefel) would have served much better and cost about the same.
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