Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

"Mastering RMI: Developing Enterprise Applications in Java and EJB" (Wiley Computer Publishing; ISBN 0-471-38940-4) by Rickard Oberg is by an underground expert on EJBs. People who have hung on EJB mailing lists quickly learn about Rickard. He is one of those helpful people who knows what he is talking about.

The book opens with an introduction to client/server architecture, which talks about alternatives to RMI such as the Web, RPC, and CORBA. The second chapter starts talking about RMI basics. The second part of the book shows how to write RMI applications. The third section develops real world applications instead of just test applications like the previous section. The book ends with chapters on RMI and Jini and then RMI and EJBs. Therefore, the subtitle overstates the amount of EJB material in the book.

The book is full of very good broken out tips that appear every few pages. The book is also full of interesting code snippets.

This is the only book I've read on RMI, but it is a worthy book. If you want to learn more about RMI, then this book is useful.