About the book

Pages: 362
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Release: Aug 2013
ISBN-10: 978-1-4493-7016-9
ISBN-13: 1-4493-7016-0

Book details

I received this book as a part of the now dead O'Reilly users group program. When I asked for this book I was specially interested due comments from my development peers . . . and most importantly because I was in the middle of a Software Architecture definition.

I'm writing this review after 7 months of using it on daily basis, basically because our development stack is composed by AngularJS on the front-end and JavaEE 7 on the back-end (with a huge bias to the Hat company). At the office we have a small books collection (because IT books are pretty dead after five years), and Aurun's book is our prefered book for the "Java EE 7 rescue kit".

If I have to choose two adjectives for this book I must say "quick and versatile", this book deserves all of its fame because it has the balance between a good reference book and a user friendly introductory book, most of the IT books don't achieve it.

I don't wanna copy the index page but I have the following favorite chapters:

• Servlets
• RESTFul Web Services
• SOAP Web Services
• JSON Processing
• Enterprise Java Beans
• Context and Dependency Injection
• Bean Validation
• Java Transactions
• Java Persistence

Most of the book samples are based on Glassfish, and is easy to guess why looking at the publication date. However, talking from my true-heavy-metal-monkey-developer-architect experience, this book uses only pure JavaEE 7 apis and I've been able to run/use the samples on Wildfly without issues.

For those that are looking a good book for JavaEE 7 development, on any of the certified Java EE 7 servers this is a must.

Highlights

• Good balance between tutorial and reference.
• Few content compared to the Java EE Tutorial but still in the point.
• The samples should work on any Java EE 7 server.

Could be better

• WebSockets section is small in relation to the other chapters, it feels incomplete.
• The cover brings to my mind the good old days when Glassfish was that application server that everybody is talking.