Being a .NET developer, I had a good idea about system architecture overall coming into this book, but admittedly little in terms of concept that were specific to Java. I feel confident about developing dynamic apps with J2EE now after reading this work. It does a great job of introducing the major concepts within Java 2 Enterprise Edition (JavaServer Pages, Enterprise JavaBeans, servlets, XML, web services, using a variety of appServers, etc.).

The introductory chapters talk about installing J2EE, relating it to J2SE, and setting the all-important environment path variables. The examples are complete, with step-by-step instructions on coding, compiling, deploying and executing examples for console, desktop and web environments. It's not one of those books that is heavy on theory and light on pragmatic examples - the concepts are backed by real-world apps. Each example is also presented for execution in both the default documentation appServer for J2EE, as well as Tomcat. It's a nice mix that isn't married to one specific platform.

The authors enforce a strict usage tiered system design, and demonstrate how to move from simple 3-tier applications to MVC- and pattern-based n-tier architectures using complex components. On this note, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on developing EJBs, which were very healthy.

However, I thought the last two chapters on web services with Java, while helpful, were incomplete, specifically in the areas of developing multi-platform clients to access SOAP messages through JAX-RMI. I would have liked to see Swing/AWT utilities and JSP-based clients call not only Java web services, but also HTTP-SOAP services using .NET and other vendor platforms to reinforce the main advantage of decoupled distributed systems.

But nonetheless, I found this book to be a great help in my quest to get myself up to speed with modern-day Java development. I'm a better programmer for having read it, and I recommend you do, too.