I had the "bad luck" to start work with Enterprise Java Beans in real world solutions at an early stage. Bad luck because maybe the techniques were mature, but the documentation and published material around it was not.

Consider the concept this delicately sized book (300 pages) is built upon. "Recipes" to solve both common and less common problems a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) developer is doomed to encounter in her everyday work. Sooner or later. An appealing concept indeed, but some remarks must to be added.

First, the tips and hints here are of little value if you are just an enthusiastic apprentice in the "EJB-kitchen". You must have a solid J2EE-knowledge as a foundation, AND some experience as well. Second, it is a pain to read this book from start to end. Even trying to read a single chapter feels annoying. Truly, you are not meant to read it this way. But when you scan the wrapping or read synopsis you are seduced into that impression

Finally the code samples/solutions in this book are clean and easy to read, but testing the code reliability in an acceptably simple way is not easily done because of the required J2EE-framework. In the EJB world one just does not write a small "main" program and watch how things work out.

At the end there is a chapter dedicated to this testing problem. "A deployment and testing appetizer" which explains how you can use the open source products Apache and Ant as testing tools. I haven't tried this approach for myself.

All the "recipes" and the disposition of them in chapters is tastefully done. Also note that the book is aimed for the EJB developer (programmer) in first hand. Not for the system architect or the EJB deployment roles. Conclusion use of this book as a tutorial tool will probably fail, while it is a good buy for the more experienced J2EE-programmer.