general

Rod Johnson is doing a great service to the J2EE technical community with his books. This latest book is definitely a myth buster, that I was personally looking for.

I will tell you right away that this is not an anti-EJB book
that tries to prove you a case against EJBs. This is not a
cheap "Spring" framework promotion book either. This is a very mature expert one-on-one advice that is well worth getting.

Rod gives you a nicely rounded manual how to architect solid J2EE application using the latest and greatest practical solutions available both through the open source and JSR community. He propagates two extremly important ideas:
Lightweight containers and (simplified) Aspect Oriented Programming. Moreover, ha makes a very strong case for the application of Inversion of Control principle (IoC) in your applications. If you are not familiar with IoC: I see it pretty much as a savior to a J2EE technology. J2EE grew incredibly big, complex and fluffy in the recent years, and is at risk of being outflanked by more simplistic .NET solutions.
IoC offers "back to basics" approach where you as a good OO architect focus on the solid business domain model without poluting it with the infrastructure code. Through IoC supporting methods (such as Aspects) you then externalize the infrastructural pieces (transactions, pooling, persitence, logging, auditing,...) that make you apps run in the enterprise environement.

Rod's book gave me a very good basis for the creation of my own state-of-the-art J2EE solution and I am grateful for it. It is the best thirty-some dollars that I spent in the long time.

One more thing, this book in NOT a re-write of his previos book "J2EE Design and Development". I have both and they are not the same. I think you have to have both on your bookshelf in order to get the full treatment.

Rod Johnson again offers to his fans another great Java best-seller. This book is the next level of his previous book "J2EE Design and Development" and offers different information on different purposes but it doesn't about bashing EJB's or some kind of "Spring framework for all purpose" tool.
This book covers very important topics like Architecture (a vision from J2EE past and present), Lightweight containers and Spring (covering its principal features) and a "Sample App" to give us a very excellent example on using all the stuff. Great job Rod !

While the book is well written, many materials were already covered in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Programmer to Programmer)

The remaining 50% is mainly from the framework reference document and can be downloaded free from the project site.