Applied Enterprise JavaBeans Technology

If there's one J2EE book to use as a starting point it's this one. Boone has many working examples with useful comments in the source code.He even develops working examples of home-grown middleware to give a flavour of what J2EE is really trying to accomplish (while stripping away the complexities that accompany a mature middleware product).The example JCA 1.0 resource adapter distinguishes this book from others which assume the software developer will buy resource adapters from a 3rd-party. At some point, a software developer will have to integrate with something somewhat proprietary, and being able to see the guts of a resource adapter allows one to make better decisions about how to approach such problems.

This is an excellent book to help you understand ejb 2.0. What i like best about this book is that it not only tells you how to use ejb's, but above all it tries to help you understand how ejb's work.All examples use the sun j2ee reference implementation. This book does not discuss in depth how to use the deployment descriptors, as it assumes you'll be using some ui to do this.