Rating: 
Summary: Get up to speed quickly
Review: The purpose of this book is to get you up and running quickly. It is for people who want to get their hands on the technology quickly, before having to digest a thousand pages of text. It has step-by-step cookbook tutorials that walk you through deploying and writing your first J2EE applications. I teach courses on J2EE, and I use this book plus Ed Roman's Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans.The book does not provide complete coverage (and in some places is far from it), but you can get servlets, JSPs, EJBs of all flavors and a simple database up and running quickly. In this role, as a quick start to a complicated technology, the book performs admirably, although not without its faults. Some people may rather skip this tutorial and go straight to books that provide deeper, more comprehensive coverage of the J2EE topics. I haven't found a single book that I like for all the topics; I would suggest three books: one on EJBs, one on JMS and another on Servlets and JSPs. You might even want to get separate books on servlets and JSPs as some of the better texts target one or the other. And of course, you can always download the tutorial for free--I happen to like a printed and bound version. I have to mention that the J2EE SDK that the book uses is a just-barely-adequate-for-learning J2EE implementation, and many things you take for granted (such as mapping CMP entity beans to a database schema) are missing. You'll quickly want to move on to almost ANY other application server before taking on any of your own projects.
Rating:
Summary: Get up to speed quickly
Review: The purpose of this book is to get you up and running quickly. It is for people who want to get their hands on the technology quickly, before having to digest a thousand pages of text. It has step-by-step cookbook tutorials that walk you through deploying and writing your first J2EE applications. I teach courses on J2EE, and I use this book plus Ed Roman's Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans. The book does not provide complete coverage (and in some places is far from it), but you can get servlets, JSPs, EJBs of all flavors and a simple database up and running quickly. In this role, as a quick start to a complicated technology, the book performs admirably, although not without its faults. Some people may rather skip this tutorial and go straight to books that provide deeper, more comprehensive coverage of the J2EE topics. I haven't found a single book that I like for all the topics; I would suggest three books: one on EJBs, one on JMS and another on Servlets and JSPs. You might even want to get separate books on servlets and JSPs as some of the better texts target one or the other. And of course, you can always download the tutorial for free--I happen to like a printed and bound version. I have to mention that the J2EE SDK that the book uses is a just-barely-adequate-for-learning J2EE implementation, and many things you take for granted (such as mapping CMP entity beans to a database schema) are missing. You'll quickly want to move on to almost ANY other application server before taking on any of your own projects.
Rating: 
Summary: Too shallow and too many errors
Review: This book focuses too much on Sun's application server, and not enough on the concepts behind the standardized J2EE. At the same time it has a very long chapter on XML which could have been left out since there are plenty of good books and Web sites that already cover the topic. The XML chapter does not even mention XML Schema, which are replacing DTDs as the standard way to describe the layout of an XML document. Also, the book lacks a sufficient amount of code examples. There are also numerous errors in the page references in the book's index. Avoid this book if you are really wanting to learn J2EE.
Rating:
Summary: A different approach
Review: This book is part of Sun' 'The Java Series' and has the same content as you can find online at Sun' site. Why buy a book you can get for free? Convenience!! You can take it anywhere and read it anytime and printing all 450+ pages off of the internet onto 8 1/2" X 11" paper is not feasible. The content of the book is thorough and covers the uses and implementations of the various J2EE parts in depth. Where the book really excels above other Enterprise Java books is in describing the deployment process and how the different J2EE concepts all work together to create a single application. The authors give very detailed, step by step instructions on exactly how to use the deploy tool to create the various deployment files (WARs, JARs, web.xml, etc.). at each stage in the book they show you the exact steps needed to compile and then package the various pieces of the application into a deployable form that can be used as a real, working application. The book references a complete sample project that is included on the CD. This complete project makes it easier to understand the various concepts and how they all tie together. This is as opposed to other Enterprise books that use a separate example for each topic and never show the technologies used together. The only noticeable drawback of this approach is that the code samples presented are usually snippets from larger classes and can not be used alone for a reader to practice and play with. At times I found the flow of the book hard to follow and only after reading a page or two into a chapter or section did I understand the direction the author was headed. This is most likely a result of having multiple authors for the book and encountering different styles at different times. Most readers will get the best value out of the book in learning the details of the deployment process along with other related concepts and steps. The second most valuable lesson is the big picture view you get of an entire web application. You won't find useful code samples to play and experiment with but those can be found in most other books. Which is why using this book in conjunction with another is probably the best way to go. No one uses just one book to study with - so find your favorite other Enterprise Java book with good workable samples and then use this as a compliment to it.
Rating: 
Summary: This tutorial needs a tutorial!
Review: This was a great book to get started but it's too thin on the fundamentals and (in my opinion) too focused on Sun's J2EE SDK tool to be of serious value in the "real world". It is a good book if you just need to get going with J2EE, on the other hand, but only if you really want or need step-by-step instructions -- I found this to be the biggest selling point of this book, since every activity had a detailed list of the steps needed to get the examples running. That said, I really wanted more overview of the topics covered in the example programs instead of simply being told how to get the sample applications running. This book would be perfect for me if there were a 2nd companion book that went into detail on the fundamentals introduced in this tutorial. Maybe a 2 volume bundled set would be better, with this book being the step-by-step guide for examples and another title introducing and detailing the concepts that the tutorial uses. I also found this book to be outdated now that J2EE 1.4 is coming out: I spent a lot of time online reading the "addendum" that's available for free!
Rating: 
Summary: Voluminous Standard Work
Review: Voluminous Standard Work
"The J2EE tutorial" addresses readers with a certain level of preliminary knowledge of the Java Standard Edition and web application development. It does a remarkable job on covering the broad range of technologies, which lie under the hood of the J2EE 1.4 standard (JAXP, Servlets, JSP, JavaServer Faces, EJB, JAX-RPC/Webservices, JMS). Notwithstanding the quantity of subjects, the detail level is just fine for a good overview, while common issues are still being explained more in-depth.
The chapters are arranged in a logical order, and guide the reader from basic to more advanced topics. Writing style, lots of cross-links as well as a high number of source code examples improve readbility and comprehensibility. Highly recommend as one of the best "one-covers-all" J2EE books.
P.S. I refer to the second edition published in summer 2004.
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