I have seen these "Head First" "Brain-Friendly" study guides on the shelves for a while now. I have even been amused to see a few in the hands a couple of Java noobs. Having been a programmer for a few years I generally want books that have more of a reference value to them, and generally don't buy computer books with cute pictures in them -- being more of the diagram sort myself.

However, I have a new job in the J2EE world and have been finding it more challenging that I would have thought. It turns out that J2EE has so much related information that just knowing how to program only get you so far -- I suppose this is true in any development environment but as a C++ developer the windows technologies that I have learned have sort of grown with me. I have been in a state of culture shock with J2EE.

The first few things I did were pretty easy. JSP is much like PHP. Web services are not all that complicated to implement since tools do most of the work for you. Then I ran into EJB's. Simple enough, just a Plain old java object with a few restrictions -- WRONG!

I suddenly found that I didn't really understand J2EE at all.

So I did what I always do when I run into new technology, I ran to the bookstore for some nice reference material. But the bookstore was full of EJB 3.0 books and I needed to know about EJB 2.0. I had just run into some serious computability issues (anyone who maintains java's platform independence is delusional) and I really didn't want to try to figure the difference between what is new and what is old. The only book I could find on EJB 2.0 material was "Head First EJB: Passing the Sun Certified Business Component Developer Exam" by Kathe Sierra and Bert Bates.

Well, it IS an O'Reilly book. I am a big fan of O'Reilly books as they tend to be great references (I have been burned by a couple but most are good). So I opened it up and took a good look:

The first thing you notice are the cute pictures and cartoon like notes. They actually have cartoon EJB's talking in little speech bubbles. They have 1950 advertising pictures photoshoped to add notes or EJB-relevant graphics.

However the information I was looking for seemed to be there, and I figured that the pictures might help me make sense of it faster. And, I really needed a reference. So I brought it home. I quickly found it to be a very good book. The section on RMI was really very very helpful. I quickly found my problems vanishing and EJB's up and working.

I have to say that I think this is a great introduction to EJBs. I can't say it makes a great study guide or not, but I can say that it helps a great deal in understanding the principals behind EJB's.

There are a few things I wish it had:

Some more information on Deployment Descriptors.
A brief overview of understanding JNDI contexts.
A description of how the classloader works with EJB's (maybe a description of the Manifest file for EJBs).

However this book did rapidly get me to the point where I understood enough about things to find the answers I needed with a few well placed google searches.

All in all I would say this was a very good book for anyone who wants to start writing EJB's. It will not help you use the XDoclet tools in Eclipse or IntiliJ (or whatever IDE you may use) so I can't really say that it is a good book for people who just want to get the job done, but it will help you understand what those tools are doing for you.

I had the same experience with these guides. I thought the stupid picutures on the cover were just...well...stupid. And the cheesy pics inside? How could anyone learn from such a juvenile book? Well, a few years ago, I read someone's copy of Head First Design Patterns, and I found myself dead wrong. It was really enjoyable and a great intro to the GOF patterns. There's a lot of redundant info (intentionally) presented in different ways for people who learn differently. I breezed right through it and ony fell asleep a few times (usually when in bed). I haven't read any other Head First books, but my experience with that one was good.

I feel your pain with J2EE. We are converting our CORBA structure to EJBs. I was excited until I found out we were going EJB 2.1 instead of EJB 3.0. It's still better than using CORBA in a Java-only environment, though.

One the the really big disappointments for me has been that I have yet to get past J2EE 1.4. When I was getting ready for the interview and what not I read up on the J EE 5 and I thought it was simply great. I was ready to go. But to my surprise nothing I am doing is anywhere there. Heck everything I do is still JRE 1.4 (well actually we did a project in 1.5 but it turns out it needed to be in 1.4... oopse).

I have almost completed Head First HTML with CSS (XHTML). Its a great book, honest! Although it seems that they strech little information on a lot of pages it does achieve its goal. To teach you HTML,XHTML and CSS. This is the only techincal book that I can read more than 1 chapter at a time.

I will have to give this book a read. I have the Head First Design Patterns book and I was impressed by the manor in which they addressed the topic. I am also a huge fan of O'Reilly and so with them publishing the Head First series I am confident that they are putting forth good material.