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Book Reviews

This book review was submitted by a DenverJUG member as part of the Book Review Program.

BOOK DETAILS

REVIEWER

Steve Nicodemus

REVIEW

Beginning J2EE 1.4 is an introductory J2EE book for someone who is already familiar with J2SE. It could be used either for self-study or as a classroom textbook. Several topics are introduced, including JSP, Servlets, JDBC, EJB, and J2EE Web Services, but none are covered in detail. After reading this book, it would be good to read other books on these topics or a more advanced book on J2EE. The publisher has another book called Pro J2EE 1.4: From Novice to Professional that takes up where this one leaves off.

This book assumes knowledge of the core Java language, but it is not necessary to have a great deal of experience with it. It would probably be enough to have read a book or taken a class in Java. Specifically, it would be useful know about the basic syntax and semantics of Java, packages, threads, data structures such as hash tables and maps, RMI, and Java Beans. The reader should also have some familiarity with HTML, XML, and perhaps HTTP. Some SQL is included, but it is described in Appendix B.

This book is written with its samples in Windows XP Professional and NT. If another operating system such as UNIX is used, more familiarity with it is required; for example how to set up environment variables and install and run programs.

The material is well presented. The examples are very detailed at first and include less detail each time the material is covered. The illustrations go well with the text, and make it much easier to follow. Some basic concepts are presented in chapter 1 for readers who are unfamiliar with them. These include multi-tier and client-server architectures and containers. Each chapter after Chapter 2 has two to five exercises at the end to reinforce the material presented. The book shows how to run many of the examples both using the J2EE SDK server and the Apache Tomcat server.

There are some problems with the examples. There is no CD included with the book, but the source code is available as a ZIP file from the publisher's web site. The source code ZIP file contains ZIP files for each chapter, and each of these files include several more ZIP files. Because of this, it takes some time to extract all of the examples. The examples from chapters 3 and 4 are in .war files, and there is no explanation of how to use them. I had to type them in myself, and never got some of them to work properly. Sun's J2EE SDK may have changed since the book was written, since most of the menu items are named differently. Usually they are similar enough that this is not a serious problem, especially since the illustrations make clear what the resulting window should look like.

The book includes 13 chapters and 3 appendices. Chapter 1 summarizes the essentials of J2EE including how J2SE and J2EE fit together, architectures, components, and brief summaries of the topics covered in the rest of the book. Chapter 2 tells how to install J2EE and test the installation. Chapters 3 and 4 cover JSP (JavaServer Pages). Chapter 5 is about Servlets. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss working with databases and JDBC. Chapters 8 through 10 are about EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans). Chapter 11 covers design patterns and Message-Driven Beans. Chapters 12 and 13 are about J2EE Web Services and JAX-RPC. Appendix A tells how to install Tomcat. Appendix B introduces SQL and EJB-QL. Appendix C is a glossary.

Overall, this is a good introduction to J2EE for Java programmers wanting to learn about J2EE.

Download sample chapter: Chapter 8, EJB Fundamentals