Review by Billy Barron

"Developing Java Enterprise Applications" (Wiley Computer Publishing; ISBN 0-471-31952-X) by Asbury and Weiner covers the most important Java APIs that the enterprise developer who uses Java. This is not a book for the person who just writes little web applets, which is good because too many books are already on the market that cater to that crowd.

The books covers JDBC, RMI, JNDI, JTS, JMS, JSP, EJB, and a few other technologies. The book tends to alternate between explanatory and example chapters. So first, JDBC is discussed and then the next chapter walks through an example.

Given the number of topics in this book, each topic is not covered in full detail as most of the topics are worthy of a book all their own (and many of them already have one). However, this book's goal is to cover just enough so you can understand the technology and get started using its core features.

Therefore, this makes the book excellent for trying to figure what these technologies do. In fact, this book is readable by managers as well as developers, if the managers skip the example chapters.

From reading this book, you get the impression that the authors have quite a bit of experience, have used the technologies discussed, and know what they are talking about. On the whole, this is a great book for getting your feet wet with Enterprise Java.