The book's subtitle is "Passing the Sun Certified Business Component Developer Exam". Since I haven't taken the exam or prepped for it, I'm not qualified to speak on whether this book would really help you to pass the exam. What I can comment on is the style of the book and the breadth of its coverage. The book takes a dry subject and livens it up with "eye candy", which includes "handwritten" notes, puzzles, graphics, drawings, cartoons, and diagrams. Most of the time you are not reading text but pictures! This format holds your attention longer than narrative and aids in recall of what you've "read".
This book covers all the different types of beans used in EJB development. It also covers JNDI, remote vs. local, and home interfaces and objects. It even covers EJB-QL.
I recommend you make this book your first introduction to EJBs. Then move on to a more advanced book that will have a complete EJB application. The graphics in <u>Head First EJB</U> will help you "picture" what is going on from the client perspective, the server perspective, and within the container. Knowing this is crucial to understanding EJB development. The pictures in the architectural overview section are particularly worthy.
Another section that will give your EJB developer life an easy start is the section on a bean's environment. This section covers the deployment descriptor. Even if most of us use XDoclet to generate the DD, it is still nice to be able to read the DD and understand what it is telling us.
After you've programmed EJBs for a while, I recommend you return to this book for your study for the Business Component Developer certification. The book takes the "Sun speak" for the exam objectives and turns them into simple explanations so that you can understand what it is you really need to know. And each chapter ends with mock exam questions to help you test yourself. Plus the book has a 70 question final mock exam to take after you have read 636 pages.
This book claims not to be a reference book. But I certainly think you'd come back to this book again and again to look up a quick explanation of how something works. Much development is "trial by fire" and we use something (perhaps through a tool such as XDoclet) without really understanding its fundamentals. When you have time, you can read excerpts from this book to get the fundamentals.
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