Since JMS provisioning became mandatory in J2EE1.3 application servers and with EJB2.0 providing message driven beans, the role of JMS in enterprise applications has become more prominent.

This book provides an adequate reference on the features and facilities of JMS for those wishing to build robust, loosely coupled asynchronous Java applications. The book assumes knowledge of Java but to make the most of the text, readers really must also be familiar with JNDI, EJBs, Servlets/JSP and XML.

Less than a third of the book(200 pages) is dedicated to covering the JMS API and the JMS architecture. In these pages the reader is provided with a clear introduction to what can be achieved with the point-to-point messaging and also the 'publish and subscribe approach'. Version 1.0.2 of the API is covered, the latest being 1.1. In defence however, the book was published in 2000.

The age of the book really shows in the padding chapters (over 300 pages) with sections on using JMS in web application, EJBs, XML messaging and Mobile applications with all the message providers having updated their products from the ones used in the examples.

In summary, this book provides a good overview of the JMS API. However, it is spoilt with a large amount of padding that is now out of date and also in the context of the book mainly unnecessary. This, together with a price of£38.99 means there are far better and cheaper JMS texts available. Not recommended.