An excellent book
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I just can't emphasise enough what an excellent book this is, for all level of experienced programmers. I consider myself to have an intermediate knowledge of Java and a very basic knowledge of programming distributed components, but I've enjoyed every minute of my reading.
What do you need to know before reading this book? Basically you need to understand the basic of java programming like classes, methods and parameters [e.g. MyClass.method(parameter,..)] and that java needs to import certain packages to be able to make some specific functions [e.g. import javax.sql;]. Apart from this I just highly recommend you to read very thoroughly chapter 1 and 2, they will guide you nicely to understand the J2EE technologies and how the different chapters in the book approach them. J2EE is a difficult subject to learn and "Sam's Teach Yourself" tackles it magnificently, it covers absolutely everything.
A case study is followed day after day and if for some reason you can't work out the answer one day, you just can download it from the website. I haven't had a problem with any of the code, they work fine.
I'd like to respond to the previous reviewer by saying that this book is not obsolete at all, you just need to download the correct J2EE which it could be "j2eesdk-1_4_02_2005Q2-windows.exe" for windows. The book clearly specifies which version of J2EE is using at the time of writing it, by common sense is not recommended to download the latest version of J2EE two years down the line.
The only problem is that it's quite impractical to finish the book in 21 days for a complete beginner, more like 21 weeks.
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Outdated
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This book is outdated to the point of being useless. The examples throughout this book rely heavily on the use of databases, unfortunately the one the book is written for (pointbase) is no longer included with the application server (which you also need), and to make matters worse it now costs to use pointbase.
The book does point out early on that the examples can be easily modifed to work with other databases (namely the supplied apache derby). This is not true, it might be relatively easy for an experienced j2ee engineer to do this, but seeing as you want to learn this technology I doubt you are one of those.
The subject matter (j2ee) is extremely complicated and having to heavily mod every example you come across just isn't acceptable in a book aiming to rapidy teach a very complex subject. The book also uses outdated versions of the technology itself and as such I'd strongly advise against this book and to wait for the third edition, the current edition should really not even be offered anymore (at least without THIS IS OBSOLETE written on the front cover).
I wasted 30 pounds on this so you don't have to!!!
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J2EE
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A big subject, well tackled, with all the theory and hands on practical work to back it up.
Obviously first, you will need to be a proficient java programmer before learning J2EE. But don't be fooled, learning J2EE takes a lot of trial and error and practice if you are going it alone, no matter what reading material you have.
Reads more like "Teach Yourself J2EE in 21 weeks"!
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At last. A J2EE book written in a human language!
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J2EE is a deeply complex topic, and this book must be one of the first to take a programmer friendly, human readable approach to the subject. If you're a programmer, this book is likely to be far more useful to you than the books such as "Applying Enterprise Java Beans", which are written by people too close to the development of J2EE itself. This won't be an easy ride though - you will need to be proficient in Java already and be familar with much of the Java Standard Edition. Also be prepared to spend hours fiddling with tools and messing around with command lines - but that's par for the course with this topic! Thanks to the authors for finally bringing the subject back to Earth.
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