Enterprise Java Book Reviews by Gopalan Suresh Raj

	Professional Java Server Programming: with Servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), XML, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), JNDI, CORBA, Jini and Javaspaces by Andrew Patzer, Sing Li, Paul Houle, Mark Wilcox, Ron Phillips, Danny Ayers, Hans Bergsten, Jason Diamond, Mike Bogovich, Matthew Ferris, Marc Fleury, Ari Halberstadt, Piroz Mohseni, Krishna Vedati, Stefan Zeiger A great book covering a lot of ground on J2EE stuff and Jini. Good coverage on Servlets, handling and tracking user sessions, and Exception Handling within servlets. Has a good balance of explanation and example source code. Though no single book can capture the entire plethora of technologies that make up all the technologies in the J2EE spectrum, this book tries to give an excellent introduction to the subject both for the beginner and the intermediate level programmer. I highly recommend it.
	Professional JSP : Using JavaServer Pages, Servlets, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT, and WML by Karl Avedal, Danny Ayers, Timothy Briggs, George Gonchar, Naufal Khan, Peter Henderson, Mac Holden, Andre Lei, Dan Malks, Sameer Tyagi, Stephan Osmont, Paul Siegmann, Gert Van Damme, Steve Wilkinson, Stefan Zeiger, John Zukowski, Ari Halberstadt, Carl Burnham, John Timney, Tom Myers, Alexander Nakhimovsky A pretty detailed explanation of JSP and its usage with other Server side Java technologies. The authors did well in adopting Tomcat as the test-bed for the book. In the first part there is good coverage on Session Tracking. I found the chapter on custom-tags really good. The idea of Global Settings and Authentication are also neat. Also the case study showing how to port existing ASP pages to JSPs might be useful for people trying to port stuff. However if you have other Wrox titles like Professional Java Server Programming, you will find a lot of overlap in the content.
	Professional Java XML Programming with Servlets and JSP by Alexander Nakhimovsky, Tom Myers Let me start off by saying that this book is not for beginners. If you are new to Java do not buy this book. Buy this book only if you have experience working with Servlets, JSPs and JDBC. Having said that, I also find that this book is good at telling you how to evolve a system from the ground-up. In my opinion however, the title is misleading. This book is not entirely about XML. It has some XML coverage, however, the focus is more about building a complete system based on the Authors' framework and ideas which may or may not be applicable in every scenario. If you want to get any useful information out of the book, read it cover to cover. This exercise will get you thinking on ideas of how to architect systems rather than the specifics of XML, Servlets, JSPs or JDBC.