There are
alot of good books on J2EE development out there. Thing is, many of those books are written by people on this site, and they're too humble to suggest their books as the one to read. Personally, I don't suffer from that problem, but others do.
As an author and an egotist, I read a book and say "I could have written that better." However, occasionally, I read a book and think "Man, I really wish I wrote that, that was amazing!"
If you read the reviews on Amazon, I think you'll see that hundreds of other people feel the same way about the books I'm going to recommend.
For me, the following books fall into that category:
Head First Java Head First Servlets and JSPs
Head First Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Head First Design Patterns Head First OOA and D The other book I would really recommend, although I don't think it's the easy and fun read that the Head First books are, is Expert One-on-One J2EE development without EJBs. This book is written by Rod Johnson (yes, that's his real name), who is extremely important with regards to the prominence of Spring and Hibernate, which seem to be the big, dominant application design and persistence patterns in current application development with Java
J2EE without EJBs with Rod Johnson There are also a few
SCJA certification guides I could recommend, or even a few WebSphere books I think are worth reading, but I might be biased on those topics.
Happy Reading!!!
-Cameron McKenzie