Java is maturing fast and the Java 2 enterprise edition (J2EE) platform includes a whole host of technologies. This book focuses on the server elements such as the container architecture, JDBC, servlets, JSP and XML. That is not an exhaustive list; there are plenty of other subjects covered such as Enterprise JavaBeans, Performance, Scalability and Unit testing and consequently the book runs to over 1500 pages.

The material is clearly and concisely presented with plenty of complete mini-code examples that demonstrate a particular technology or combination of technologies. It is organised into chapters where each chapter deals with a particular subject in a reasonably standard manner, such as JavaMail, with an introduction, which includes any specific instructions for setting it up, the main body of explanatory text with a working example and a summary. The presentation is very good with plenty of text, screen shots and code presented against a grey background. A nice balance is achieved with sufficient code listings to illustrate the point but not so much that there are simply pages and pages of (unread) code listings. The code is available for download (~1.8Mb) from the Wrox web site.

This book will serve well those developers who want to understand what Java Server Program-ming is all about and what is involved, with good clear explanations and plenty of example code to show how it works. It assumes that the reader understands how to program in Java but even a cursory knowledge will be sufficient to follow the code examples. In short, recommended to those who want to understand and use J2EE.