Customer Reviews

Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It does not matter you love or hate EJB; any serious enterprise java application developers/architects should have this book, reat it, put it on your desk.

This is the one if not the only book on the market that can truly serve you as a comprehensive manual for J2EE solution architectures. Every line in this book is worth of gold. It personally helped me justify, reinforce, discover or solidify some very important architectural desicions in my practice.
For instance there is a whole section on presentation tier technology choices. That section covers all of the popular frameworks and technologies (JSP, Struts, XSLT,...).
Each technology is described in terms of what it is, and what are its benefits and drawbacks. Then there is a very good code samples section. Author uses one application throughout the book, and then implements it using various technologies.
Moreover, he suggests you when does it make sense, and when does it not to implement the technology as a solution. It is amazing how much wisdom is built into this book.

Of course some of the APIs covered in the book will be outdated (EJB 2.1), but that does not bother me much. The wisdom is what matters.

Writing in general is very thorough, very practical and reinforced with some very strong real life examples.
Author obviously posseses the maturity and experience that
is so rare to find.
It is a great professional resource, and career builder.

Rod Johnson is one of the few technical authors with whom I can almost never disagree. A quick read indicates clearly that his technical insight, which ranges from architectural to low-level coding best practices, are not born of some academic exercise...they are the fruit of actual production J2EE experience...not an academic blueprint. At times, I felt like I was reading my own words. Over the years, I began to wonder if I was the only J2EE developer who was not "drinking all the kool aid." My experience with over a dozen high-volume production applications moved me away from the pure party line. Now, I realize that my religion has a leader. Don't get me wrong, I learned a significant amount from this book. Rod's experience is daunting and even an experienced J2EE developer will glean countless insights from this well-written text.

So what's not to like? Well, frankly, I was disappointed that security got the same level as attention in this book as it does in most - especially since there has yet to be an excellent J2EE text produced on the topic. While I didn't expect Rod to write the definitive tome on authentication and authorization, I expected more than two pages with a collection of URLs for more info. In fact, I loved the fact that he led off the text with testing and was shocked that he didn't follow immediately with security - another system aspect that is frequently relegated to the margins...and often implemented poorly. So how does that influence my review? Well, on Amazon's five star scale, I am taking away one star....but I also started by awarding him ten stars for the rest of the text.

final static int MAX_RATING = 5;

final int rating = Math.min(MAX_RATING, (10-1));

if (rating == 5) {

   you.buyNow();

}

Rock on Rod. Can't wait for the "Developing without EJBs" text.

There's no doubt that Rod knows what he's talking about. Much of the book contained best practices that were incredibly valuable, and he seemed to have a focused direction that he wanted to take us in - not just re-hash the J2EE specification.

However, I felt like was left hanging at the end of the book. He talks about a sample application throughout his discussions on design and the source code for the application is available from wrox's (the publisher) website. But after downloading and compiling the application, I discovered that most of the web tier was left incomplete. Apparently, he leaves us to make our own decision about implementing the web-tier, but it would be nice to see at least one option illustrated completely.

All that talk about this sample application and I couldn't even run it and play with it to reinforce what I learned.

This is one of the best technical books I've ever read, regardless of topic. Johnson has an amazing technical mind and is a great writer, to boot. It has achieved the nickname "the red book" (as in "go see what the red book says") on my team, because that's where I send people for ideas and examples.

On the strength of this book, I selected the Spring Framework (an open source project based almost in whole on the concepts and code from this book) for my current team's project, and I have not one qualm about the decision. The team really loves Spring as well, and have become better programmers by having seen it in action.

A couple of weeks ago I preordered "Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB", which should prove to have more up-to-date coverage on Spring and more great ideas from Johnson and Hoeller. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Great discussion of J2EE design and development. This is not a beginners book. It has a lot of great material on the pitfalls of J2EE development and how to avoid the traps. Reads like a true "one-on-one" discusson from an expert developer.

Check out the author's work in the Spring framework: http://www.springframework.org/

Even though this book is named "J2EE design and development", it seems to be much more than that. This seems to be the book in which the author attempted to put, in a crystallized form, most of his expertise not just in J2EE (that would be trivial), but in programming and (particularly) architecture in general. Given that the author is a true expert in the field (this is clear after reading just a few pages), this book has a value beyond anything I can express here in my words. I learned from this book more than from any other book on programming and architecture, with a possible exception of GOF "Design Patterns" classics.

No other book on web programming that I know of comes even close to this one. Some noteworthy features:
-- Always framework-oriented approach (which in my view is the only possible choice for real-world projects)
-- Heavy emphasis on architectural side of web development (follows from the previous point)
-- Comparison of different view technologies from practical point of view, w/o exclusively subscribing to a particular one which seems popular (like, JSP).
-- Excellent coverage of MVC paradigm, again, w/o subscribing to a particlar implementation (like Struts, etc)
-- Extensive coverage of all levels ("tiers") of a web application.

But what really shines, are the insights on architecture, namely the things which is impossible to find out by theoretically studying J2EE specifications and books such as "Enterprise Java Beans" and the like. For example, why Entity EJBs don't work. Or when is collocated EJB architecture is more appropriate than the distributed one, and why. After reading the book, many concepts just clear up. Not to say that everything is written in a clear and concise language (despite a few typographical errors that Wrox books are notorious for).

In short, this book is simply amazing.

When I first heard about my coworkers talking about this book, I thought "oh great, another J2EE book!" Much to my surprise (& delight), this book is not a how-to recipe book at all, but rather a collection of valuable suggestions on how to use J2EE and build high-quality J2EE applications. What sets this book apart from other run-of-the-mill Java/J2EE books is it gives you suggestions distilled from lessons learned in the battlefield (not regurgitated marketing shpiel from vendors), and it tells you exactly WHY. Moreover, it tells you what the tradeoffs are for each design option you take, which is almost never mentioned in any technical books and only obtainable from work experience. I'm just glad I'd bought and read this book, because it really helped me to raise my game, and I can now design apps with much more confidence.

I chose this book because it was the No.1 best-selling book at amazon and I was not disappointed. In fact, this is one of the best architecture cum programming books I've read. This book breaks down the j2ee architecture and explains every concept from beginning to end.

The author is really a great teacher. You'll be amazed on how clear he explains things. Examples work straight away and easy to run.

For me, this is really "THE" book for J2EE.

I have a lot of books, this is the best book I had never. This book is not a theorical book, no, it offers a lot of experience tips and definitions that can convert you to a true j2EE Expert