This book disappointed me. I looked forward to an approach that would give some structure to the development of large applications, presenting a framework and suggesting Java-based approaches to the implementation of each component. How wrong I was! What this book is instead is a collection of articles of variable usefulness, but which do not hang together as a whole.

The book starts out by covering the project lifecycle. That is a book in itself and the coverage here is meagre and overly general. The only potentially useful section is that covering Java coding standards.

In the sections that follow Berg covers a variety of topics with no sense of overall structure. For example, threads are covered in the very last section, after such topics as security and database connectivity which are far less fundamental to application design and what he has to say on the subject is not particularly enlightening in any case.

The database section gives a great deal of attention to low-level issues relating to various driver types, but a lot less to the problem of object- relational mapping, which is more the real problem for enterprise design.

The CD has the usual code samples, whose quality is ok, and demo versions of commercial products, which may be of some slight interest.

In summary, don't bother. Most of what this book contains is much better covered elsewhere - some of it for free on the net.