Review of EJB 3.1 Cookbook

I just finished reading the EJB 3.1 Cookbook by Richard M. Reese. I haven't used EJBs in almost 5 years and since the JEE spec hadn't undergone any major (interesting) changes I had ignored it....until I heard about the newer and more simplified JEE 6/EJB 3 spec - the one that uses Java annotations. To me this attempt to simplify the standard seems like a very good thing in that the standards body finally started paying attention to the many accusations hurled (rightfully so) upon it my Spring, Ruby/Rails, Scala and other camps.

So, I was curious to see what the new spec looked like and coincidentally I was given a chance to review this EJB 3.1 Cookbook by Packt Publishing. The book being a cookbook/recipe book, it does not go into the details of why you should use JEE/EJB or how a beginner should get started and other such basics. It assumes that you are already familiar with programming, Java, JEE and specifically EJBs.

I must say that the new spec looks lighter and so much simpler than it did a few years ago.

The book is packed (no pun on the publisher's name) with small and useful recipes focusing on each new aspect of EJB 3.1:

• Dependency Injection (CDI)
• Stateful, stateless and singleton EJB annotations
• Persistent EJB annotations
• MDB annotations
• Timers and schedulers
• Concurrency
• Startup sequence, named and dependent EJBs
• Soap and restful web services
• Security
• Interceptors (AOP)

It is a good book to help you get up to speed on the latest spec. You might still, occasionally need to look up the detailed spec or Google or some other forum for specifics. Overall it is a good, almost vendor agnostic (Oracle Glassfish) and easily digestable read. It does lack some depth in a few places but then if you need more details, then you should read the actual spec.

As an aside, I feel all publishers should reduce the prices of their ebook/PDF versions.

Until next time,
Ashwin.