Are we allowed to write negative reviews here? Let's find out...
I am a big fan of the O'Reilly Definitive Guide series and did not hesitate to purchase the HeadFirst EJB book with little more than a glance. I am a beginner EJB user and looking to get my certification.
However, HeadFirst EJB presents its information with so much "noise" that I spend half my time separating the wheat from the chaff. Kathy and Bert clearly know their stuff. But the book is riddled with silly pictures, scrawls, and oblique textuals that I found it hard to determine what useful information was being presented. It feels more like "The Complete Idiot's Guide to EJB" than a proper study text.
A case in point is pages 8-9. Here, we see a series of 9 people in various garb with thought balloons. The purpose of the diagram is to show what is going on behind the scenes of an EJB transaction. Each person gets a label like "Client" or "Bean Pool". Their thought balloons say such things as "Uh, yeah, put the broker bean on the pone i need to make a trade NOW" and "Hey I went last time, so one of you can go now...". This particular presentation was confusing to me and offered no value over a traditional diagram.
It's one thing to offer some humor in a technical treatment, but there is such a thing as too much. And HeadFirst EJB goes too far.
The book is still useful - it offers mini-quizzes highlighting each chapter. And it walks you by the hand through the command-line and deploytool GUI. I will continue to use it to study for the exam.
But I wont buy another HeadFirst book.
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