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Rating: 
Summary: Better read Sun's website
Review: I evaluated a number of EJB 2.0 books recently and decided that this one looked the best; I think it was a good choice. This is the best EJB book I have seen.Its benefits relative to other books were:
* Current content
* Layout and presentation made it easy to extract information and actually enjoyable to read
* No fluff! They didn't waste space with copies of the ejb-jar.xml DTD, or a copy of the EJB spec I would recommend this as the EJB 2.0 book of choice for intermediate to advanced EJB developers.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book! A very enjoyable read.
Review: I found this book to be an excellent source on EJB and design in general. The authors don't stick to the normal format of typical EJB books and actually cover material that you don't find in other books. This makes for more of an enjoyable read. The included source was very helpful, as well as the warnings and tips. Good work on such a broad and complex subject.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book on many topics
Review: I give this book an A+. The first thing that hit me is the book is full of practical knowledge and experience. It's obvious that the authors have built enterprise-level systems for real companies and have not just packaged up the spec. The chapters are well organized and the writing style is exactly what I want. My only complaint is the CD contains a copy of WebLogic 6.0 and not 6.1 as it should. I've been told that the publisher is correcting the mistake. No big deal because WL is available for download from BEA. Having a trial copy of TopLink with the book is an added bonus.
Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff
Review: I have had this book for a while now, and I do find myself going back to it very often. It is very well written and explains the nuts and bolts of a complex technology in a way that is neither too simplistic nor to verbose. A good balance of theory, reference, tutorial, and design guideline.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong Hands On, Weak on Concepts?
Review: Strong Hands On, Weak on Concepts... If you're an enterprise developer, you'll find an in-depth and a practical guide to using Enterprise Java Beans. The book even covers topics such as Architecture, Services and Strategies. I have major issues with the general organization and the accuracy of its content: 1. It's frustrating again to read a book that looks and "sounds" just like the SUN EJB Specifications documents. Sometimes you wonder if the book is an extension of these specifications or these are the specifications themselves. 2. Conceptually, the book is weak on Strategies, Architecture and Patterns. I'd recommend to readers to skip these topics and concentrate on the `Hands On' chapters only. 3. I did not like the general flow of the book content. Just when you gain momentum, you often run into unnecessary topics such as a confusing BNF Guide to EJB QL Syntax or some code samples that may confuse you even more. 4. The general organization of the book may confuse readers. For instance: Bean-Managed Persistence (BMP) and Container-Managed Persistence (CMP) are both Entity Beans. The authors selected to discuss these issues under three separate super- titles: Entity Beans, BMP and CMP. On the other hand, the Session Beans super-title includes the Stateful and Stateless beans sub-topics. Logically, it'd make sense to include the BMP and the CMP discussions under the Entity Beans super-title just as the Session Beans super-title includes Stateful and Stateless beans sub-titles. 5. I found a number of instances where the content is not accurate and/or confusing. A statement such as "All entity and session beans are required to implement the ejbPassivate and ejbActivate methods" is confusing and inaccurate. Stateless Session beans are neither activated nor passivated. Stateful and Entity beans are. In many cases, vendors apply different implementations to the SUN EJB specifications. When writing a technical book, it'd be a good idea to extend the research into various vendors' implementations, just to make sure that written statements reflect the real world environment.
Rating:
Summary: Better read Sun's website
Review: The story build-up is terrible. Each time the authors try to explain something, they start talking about something else they promise to explain a few chapters later. Too much how, not enough why.
Rating:
Summary: not just ejb syntax, but best practices
Review: This is a great book. It leaves the Monson-Haefel and Roman EJB books way behind. Not only does it cover EJB 2 (local interfaces, EJB query language, etc.), but it includes a lot of "best practices". Things like the view pattern, which is not used widely enough is well defined here. All these best practices are wrapped up in a single, coherent example demonstating an on-line auction using all the components of EJB 2.0.
The chapter on Transactions, alone, is worth the cost of the book. It clearly explains all about JTS and its differing effects with BMP and CMP. How/when transactions are demarked and the difference between my (application) exceptions and the containers (system) exceptions are also clearing explained. I've found no other book that does that.
Cavaness and Keeton's writing styles are great. They don't come off as all-knowing, nor are the too casual. The writing style makes reading the book very easy. If you buy any book on EJB, buy this book.
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