Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"Enterprise JavaBeans, 2nd Edition" by Richard Monson-Haefel (O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN 1-56592-869-5) is O'Reilly's entry into the EJB book marketplace. This book does cover EJB 1.1 and does so into a vendor independent way.

The book starts with a typical introduction and then covers the EJB architecture. Chapter 3 offers one of the best nuts and bolts, under the scenes explanations of how EJB servers work that I have seen anywhere. I am using this book as a reference for a speech I'm putting together because it explains this so clearly with nice diagrams.

Chapter 4 shows you how to write your first EJBs. After you have written your beans, the next chapter shows how to access them from the client.

Entity Beans are covered next after that in great detail. The chapter goes from concept to persistence to code to life cycle issues. This is followed by a similar chapter on Session Beans with the same through coverage.

Chapter 8 then talks about transactions and how they work in EJB. The chapter starts by explaining the basic principles of transactions. Then it explains how transaction works in the EJB context.

Design strategies for EJBs are discussed next including how to avoid common mistakes. The book concludes by discussing deployment descriptors and how EJBs fit into the whole J2EE picture.

This well-written book is one of the more clear EJB books on the market. It is recommended.