I know this post is not eligible for the drawing, but I wanted to welcome Tom and Scott anyway and this seemed like the likely place.
Besides, I already own the book, both as an actual copy and as part of my safari.oreilly.com subscription.
I first saw this book in a bookstore while I was traveling. I bought it immediately and have been very, very happy with it. It's wonderfully written, has a complete set of understandable applications, and is even a good teaching tutorial for all the supplementary technologies like
Ant and XDoclet.
The only issue I've had with the book isn't with the book itself, it's with the title. Some people assume this is really just a JBoss book. It's a book teaching
Java developers how to build spec-compliant
J2EE applications from the ground up. They start with
servlets, JSPs and JavaBeans, and move to the data access object design
pattern, Hibernate, EJBs (even briefly discussing EJB 3.0), message queues, security, transactions, web services, and everything else. They just happened to use JBoss as the application server. All of the principles still apply for any J2EE application server. Read the book with that in mind and you'll be very happy.
Welcome Tom and Scott! Enjoy your stay here. I hope you enjoy the inevitable deluge of messages.
I just realized something. If you want, you could probably port all your examples and write _WebSphere at Work_, _WebLogic at Work_, _Geronimo at Work_, etc. It would be a license to print money. Do you need a coauthor, perhaps?
Ken