Improving an EJB 3 Book (EJB 3 in Action)

Hi guys,

First of all, many thanks to folks in this forum for putting in some kind words for EJB 3 in Action. We have had a stream of folks to the Manning EJB 3 in Action Author Online Forum that have mentioned this forum as a jump off point. Needless to say, I and the other authors of EJB 3 in Action are eternally grateful that you find our work useful.

We are now planing a second edition covering EJB 3.1, WebBeans 1.0 and JPA 2.0 and could really use your feedback. What would you like to see in an updated EJB 3 book at this point? Just updated content, more best practices? Performance tuning? Product/vendor selection help? Others?

I assure you, your feedback is worth it's weight in gold to us and we would listen carefully.

Many thanks in advance,
Reza

Reza,
It's nice to hear that. Thanks for coming back to share with this forum.

Personally, I would want to see a couple things in a new EJB 3 book:
1) Clear notes on what is different between 3.0 and 3.1 (some vendors are just barely on 3.0 so it's important to know what would be expected to run on different versions of the servers.
2) More on performance. I just flipped through the current copy of the book to make sure my comments make sense. The performance section was very good. But if I got a wish

. Of particular interest is when you need to go beyond the abstraction and tune the query specifically - such as returning only some fields.
3) And of course more best practices! It's been long enough since the first book came out that surely the industry has learned things.

Jeanne,

It's great to hear from you. If memory serves me correctly you were one of the very first people to write a review of the book both on JavaRanch and on Amazon.com. Many thanks for that and I am sure it has had an impact on the success of the book thus far.

Thanks also for your excellent comments. I'll incorporate them into the second edition plan.

Cheers,
Reza

P.S.: Actually, I plan on being a little more active on the net going forward trying to help people with EJB 3 projects, including this forum :-). Things seem to really be picking up for Java EE 5 and I'd hate to miss all the fun :-)

Originally posted by Reza Rahman:
If memory serves me correctly you were one of the very first people to write a review of the book both on JavaRanch and on Amazon.com.

Yes. I reviewed a MEAP PDF for JavaRanch.

Actually, I plan on being a little more active on the net going forward trying to help people with EJB 3 projects, including this forum :-). Things seem to really be picking up for Java EE 5 and I'd hate to miss all the fun :-)

Cool!

I'm using this book for SCBCD, and am very happy with it. I take the opportunity to say that I'd like to see my erratas fixed

Also, in "12.3.3 Accessing an application-managed EntityManager outside the container", it would have been cool to show a persistence.xml using Derby instead of Oracle, as people (like me) following instructions of Appendix E will probably use Derby when reading the book.

1) Clear notes on what is different between 3.0 and 3.1

Personally, I'm not too fund of this, as it tends to clutter the book. If the book says on the cover that it was updated for EJB3.1, then we know what to expect from it.

My biggest wish is : don't ruin this great book

I've seen good books being turned into "not-so-good" books after being updated, because of redundancies, inconsistencies, samples not working anymore...
[ October 17, 2008: Message edited by: Christophe Verre ]

Originally posted by Christophe Verre:
Personally, I'm not too fund of this, as it tends to clutter the book

So you don't like books with those notes in the margins that say "new for ________"?

And I definitely second "don't ruin the book"

Christophe,

Definitely remember you errata and rest assured we will take care of it :-). Indeed, we tried to take care of it on a reprint of the first edition, but the publisher was not amenable to it.

I agree with you on the Oracle XE usage. I personally would have picked Derby for the book code snippets too. I get your point about potential clutter. We'll have to make a best judgement call on that soon. It may be that simply highlighting what the EJB 3.1 changes are in the first chapter is sufficient.

I think we are very cognizant of not messing up what is clearly working and appeals to a vast majority of folks. Other than content changes, we plan to keep the overall style and feel of the book the same. We will still treat EJB 3.x/server-side development beginners as first-class citizens in our book. Of course, we have to counter-balance that a little for the "lightweight" impression that sometimes creates with some folks.

For the record, I think we covered everything of EJB 3.0 that we thought were really needed for most realistic Java EE 5 applications (maybe with the exception of better JNDI lookup coverage). In any case, I really don't think we will ever elect to write yet another stodgy text-book style tome on server-side technology. In my opinion, there's too many of those already :-). Maybe "lightweight" is actually a complement from that perspective :-).

In any case, thanks a million for your comments.

Cheers,
Reza

Hi Reza,
Thanks for the good book.
The book is very good and unarguably the best one for both EJB3 beginners and practitioners. I personally feel that it's better to provide xml alternatives (ejb-jar.xml & orm.xml with explanation) for annotations for the examples in the book. Even though it's very easy to write the EJB3 code using annotations, xml is also equally important. Also, please try to elaborate the JNDI part.

--------------------
Thanks again
Rajeev.

Rajeev,

Thanks for the kind words and your feedback. We do indeed plan to cover JNDI in greater detail. This was a big battle we lost with the publisher in the first edition due to some out-of-balance opinions from a few technical reviewers vehemently against anything JNDI. We are hoping that we won't run into the same people this time.

We can certainly also beef up the appendix covering XML DD as well. I am not really sure about putting too much DD content into the main chapters, given the clear popularity of annotations so far...

Regards,
Reza

Hi Reza,
It would be wonderful if you can put more performance tuning technique on the updated book. Performance tuning for Java EE applications is becoming more and more crucial for large enterprise applications.

Hi Reza,

First of all: Great Book, i decided today to continue my preparation for SCBCD with it. (fortunately i am at the beginning)

One suggestion: would you please provide a possibility to submit own errata and also provide a download link to these "unconfirmed errata". I saw some other books doing this. I find it very useful.

After reading your book, maybe i will make some other suggestions if any.
(und sure if your book is not yet on market

)
[ October 31, 2008: Message edited by: Salah Lejmi ]

Is there any option to have this book as a "single point of resouce" for EJBs as a whole? May be a precise introduction and a sample program of prior version of EJBs in one chapter!

In such case, it may be a very good and excellent resource and people/newbies may not really need to pick up a different book to get to know the history!

May be off the track, but I just tend to read about the history (WHAT) before reading the present and the changes incorporated (WHY and HOW).

Focussing to serve the purpose of the title "EJB3", I would prefer the "Performance Tuning" aspects with more in depth coverage!

Salah,

Good feedback on the errata. The current mechanism for Manning is the "Author Online" forum. We do have some downloadable errata available on the book's website. Luckily, we just have a small number thus far, even after about a year after the initial publish date.

Cheers,
Reza

Raghavan,

OK, I will talk with my co-authors about it. Since EJB 2.x is so outdated at this point, we may opt not to cover it too much. If you have noticed, EJB 3.x is a world apart from the initial versions.

Cheers,
Reza

in EJB 3.0, how to implement lazy-loading concept ?
Please provide some example..

Thanks in Advance,
YAR

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