After reading all the positive comments, I bought this book. After reading it, I was totally disappointed.The writing style is good, but technically this book is weak and full of errors. There is no doubt that the author never tested the code. The code listing on the CD rom is just a bunch of text files ending with with .txt extension. The book is no more than a copy & paste of stuff taken off the net. For example, to explain the BMP entity bean, the author used a ProductBEan example, in the ejbLoad() call, the product ID member field was used. But does the author understand the ID field must be set somehow? This is done in the ejbActivate() call in SUN's online tutorial, but in the book the ejbActive() is empty. Clearly, the author does not understand the life-cycle of ejbs.So if you are looking for a J2EE book, look elsewhere, if you are trying to learn some JSP, it may offer some help.