This book promises much, but delivers little. For starters, it has several errors--for example, on page 188, several times it refers to "EJB" as "EBJ". Perhaps that's trivial, but, chapter after chapter, I found faults in the examples that prevented them from running. Worst is the chapter on Entity Beans--it contains a reasonably good expose on the theory and practice of Entity Beans, but the example contains no client code, no instructions on mapping the Entity Bean to an underlying database, and no clue as to the relational tables that the Entity Bean accesses.

In other words, this book lost my trust. If you buy it, read it for the solid explanations of the concepts around jsp's, servlets, tag libraries, and EJB's--but don't expect the examples to work. And have your environment already set up, because this book won't guide you through that.