Who Should Read This Book? (Enterprise JavaBeans)

0.2. Who Should Read This Book?

This book explains and demonstrates the fundamentals of the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture. Although EJB makes distributed computing much simpler, it is still a complex technology that requires a great deal of time to master. This book provides a straightforward, no-nonsense explanation of the underlying technology, Java classes and interfaces, component model, and runtime behavior of Enterprise JavaBeans.

Although this book focuses on the fundamentals, it's no "dummy's" book. Enterprise JavaBeans embodies an extremely complex and ambitious enterprise technology. While using EJB may be fairly simple, the amount of work required to truly understand and master EJB is significant. Before reading this book, you should be fluent with the Java language and have some practical experience developing business solutions. Experience with distributed object systems is not a must, but you will need some experience with JDBC (or at least an understanding of the basics) to follow the examples in this book. If you are unfamiliar with the Java language, I recommend that you pick up a copy of Learning Java™ by Patrick Neimeyer and Jonathan Knudsen, formerly Exploring Java™, (O'Reilly). If you are unfamiliar with JDBC, I recommend Database Programming with JDBC™ and Java™ by George Reese (O'Reilly). If you need a stronger background in distributed computing, I recommend Java™ Distributed Computing by Jim Farley (O'Reilly).