I am a (software development) middle manager with a background as a C programmer. Every 2-3 years I'll buy 1 book + products to try to stay relatively current with industry evolution. I bought VB 4.0 & MS Access and was able to use the VB 4.0 documentation alone to build a fairly elaborate application. I bought Borland JDeveloper & Oracle and with the help of Teach Yourself Java in 21 days was able to migrate my application to (i.e. rewrite my application for) Java/Oracle. Now I acquired J2EE from Sun and mySQL with a view to migrating the same application, bought this book, and find that this book is of absolutely no help whatsoever. This book is reliant on downloadable samples (which are now out-of-date and unusuable) and fails to explain what I want: nuts-and-bolts construction of a "Hello World" type program where I hand-craft a JSP, a servlet, a session bean and an entity bean using the mySQL database (which I had up and running within 1 hour of download) to extract the "Hello" and the "World" from 2 separate columns in a database table, and hand-craft the deployment descriptors needed to package & deploy the application.

This book is shelved. When I figure out what I want to learn from other sources, I'm inclined to try to write an alternative text to recoup my wasted $50+.

This book covers a wide range of key points in the Java2EE technology, very complete reference for begginers and advanced programmers.

The book and the code you download from Sam's website is based on a Pointbase embedded database, but Java J2EE now comes with a Derby database, so you aren't able to create and install your database. I suppose this book would work as a reference manual for some things, but you definitely won't be able to teach yourself much.

The different authors write different chapters defining some things differently.

The material is outdated, you'll constantly have to update their junk to make it work.

Way too verbose and bouncing back and forth within an individual chapter (just try those two early BMP/CMP chapters).

It's just not worth $1.

Use the sun tutorials for a much better and much much clearer start.

The book's case studies, code and build files assume that J2EE 1.4 comes
with the PointBase database server. J2EE 1.4 currently only comes bundled with the Derby database server. As a result, the book is useless. Emails to the publisher failed to resolve the problem.