Book review: “EJB 3.1 Cookbook” by Richard M. Reese

Review

The kind people at Packt gave me a copy of “EJB 3.1 Cookbook” by Richard M. Reese to review. This book should be viewed as a collection of building block recipes, not as a collection of meal plans, and not as a how to cook book that you would read from cover to cover. When I look at the book from this point of view, I think that it is well structured and put together and the content is pitched just about right. This book does not tell you when to use a specific recipe, so it would be a mistake to think that this is the only book you would need for EJB 3.1. However, when you need a “Béchamel sauce”, this is a book that you can go to, quickly find and open up the right section and read the recipe to refresh your mind and get cooking.

The book itself is aimed at Java EE and EJB developers, promising to bring them quickly up to speed on how to use EJB 3.1 techniques through the use of step-by-step examples. I think that the back cover of this book could be designed a little better in terms of putting the book into context with regards to skill level and where the book should sit in a learning tree. In my view this book should be aimed for three audiences: the occasional EJB developer who has to work on other things a lot; the intermediate EJB developer who is moving to the EJB 3.1 platform from a previous release; and the beginning EJB 3.1 developer who has just read their first book or two on EJB 3.1 and now is trying to develop EJB 3.1 applications.

The cookbook format works well for a reference book when you know that you need to do XYZ, it will have a section that you can find quickly, and that section will be easy to find and contain some of the common tricks and pitfalls that apply to doing XYZ. When reviewing this book it is all too easy to fall into the “as an EJB architect” trap and point out that the book does not tell you when to do XYZ or how to decide between XYZ and ABC. Architects should not be reading cookbooks to find the answers to these kinds of questions.

There are some specific criticisms that I have with this book:

• The book says that it uses Netbeans and Glassfish. To be honest I found very little in the book that is specific to either, and I think that the author would have been better off saying that all the examples were tested on Glassfish (which, as the reference implementation, should guarantee that they will work on all EJB 3.1 containers) and that IDE examples used Netbeans.
• Chapter 11 covers packaging the EJBs, yet it does not cover or even hint at how to achieve this using the build tools that most developers use, e.g. ANT, Maven, etc. I think chapter 11 would be significantly enhanced if it included at least “Packaging EJBs using Apache ANT” and “Packaing EJBs using Apache Maven” recipes. Recipes for some of the other newer build tools like Buildr would be a bonus, but one could be forgiven for leaving them out.
• There is no chapter on testing EJBs. In fact there are no testing recipes at all. No developer should be writing code without tests. At a minimum I would like to see a recipes like “Unit testing EJBs with mocking frameworks”, “Testing EJBs using OpenEJB’s embeddable container”, “Testing EJBs using JBoss’s embeddable container”, “Testing EJBs using Glassfish’s embeddable container”. I’m sure books could be written on the fine arts of each of these recipes but a book like this should at least be sketching out that this kind of thing is possible.

Despite these criticisms, the recipes that it does provide are clearly written and well set out in a consistent format. I specifically liked the “There’s more” section that each recipe has. If you try to read this book cover to cover you will be annoyed at the repetition, but then cookbooks are not meant to be read that way!

I would recommend this book for beginner and intermediate level developers who are either occasionally working with EJB 3.1 or who are moving from a previous version of EJB to 3.1. More advanced developers may not find many recipes that interest them, and architects will not find any guides about how to pick which recipes to combine to make the meal.

Overall: 6 out 10.

Book details

URL: http://www.packtpub.com/ejb-3-1-cookbook/book
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Language: English
Paperback: 436 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date: June 2011
ISBN: 1849682380
ISBN 13: 978-1-84968-238-1
Author(s): Richard M. Reese