Rating: 
Summary: For me this book is my first look at J2EE.
Review: Web design with Java was a very complicated concept for me to understand. I just couldn't grasp the logic behind the code. After reading this book, there are still some areas I have trouble understanding but for the most part I am now beginning to see just how powerful J2EE really is. Barish's 400 page manual is well documented and the author tries to keep the level of understanding to middle level technical person. While there are some sections that require a higher technical level, section like client/server communications require a lower level understanding. The book explains how request processing works, how to work with JDBC and SQL together, how to use Java beans and an abundance of other topics. The author make sure that as much information as possible is included. The cd-rom included has code that pertains to section from the book and with the examples in the book, any developer should be able to have an excellent starting point. With a subject like this the manual could have been 3 or 4 times the amount of pages, the author has put together the most important points and what you have is the best I have seen. Overall I found this book to not only benefit myself and enhance my personal knowledge, but several of my friends have also read parts of the book and found it to be something they could use in the their jobs as well.
Rating:
Summary: Clear description of important concepts
Review: While this book uses J2EE as the basis for scalability and performance strategies in web application development, it is also useful regardless of the development and technical environment. The author begins this book with the clearest and easiest-to-follow descriptions of performance and scalability and how to measure them that I've ever read. The same treatment was given to web applications architecture, which is the second topic in sequence. I like Mr. Barish's straightforward, conversational writing style and use of simple (but effective) illustrations, graphs and examples that make complex concepts easy-to-grasp. I stated above that this book can be used outside of the J2EE environment, and here are the chapters that are generic enough to accomplish this: 1 (Scalable and High Performance Web Applications), 2 (Web Application Architecture), 4 (Scalability and Performance Techniques), 5 (HTTP Client/Server Communication), 10 (Effective Database Design) and 12 (The Future of Web Applications). While each of these chapters are well written and go into sufficient detail for developers and architects I particularly liked chapter 10 because he explained relational database fundamentals and SQL programming with such clarity that I got more from the 42 pages that comprise this chapter than I did from a 300+ page book on the topic. The follow-on chapter on JDBC and SQL is as well written. Another reason why I liked chapter 10 is many developers understand how to develop servlets and components, but do not have sufficient understanding of relational databases. This book rectifies that, which is particularly important since most real world applications are data intensive and need to connect to databases. Additional strong points about this book include: code examples are only given to reinforce a concept or show an example. Don't expect to find a recipe book based on code - this book is about making it scalable and giving it performance characteristics. The J2EE-specific parts of the book use realistic examples and propose real world approaches. However, the strongest aspect of this book is the author stays focused on scalability and performance throughout the book, always ending each chapter with scalability and performance hints that are related to the chapter's topic. This book is for architects and software engineers who are building applications that support business-critical needs. It's clear, concise and exceptionally well written.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely useless
Review: You can think of buying this book if ( and only if ) you haven't even heard about SQL, relational DBs, HTTP and server side java. If you have even a beginner level knowledge of any topic above you won't find any new info in this book: it's extremely shallow. One of the worst technical books I've ever seen ( there was nothing to read ).
| 
