Here is why i did not like this book:
* Code snippets alongside text (in many examples) do not exhibit the concept under discussion completely. This alone was a show-stopper for me. I (and i assume others) do not want to go through a 500 line example (in appendix or companion code) to understand a concept
* Coverage on session beans could have been more exhaustive
* Coverage on message driven beans is awesomely bad
* Coverage of "Queries, Criteria, JPA QL" does not cover Criteria API. Or wait a second, maybe it does cover it but without specifying the word "Criteria API" in the text, ever!
* Mistakes in code/xml at many places, looks like released in haste before a stringent review was done (I know that errata is there, but should ...)
* The text is not structured in an intuitive way. "A summary of topics to come at start and then going deep in each topic" is not followed. At times, one has to read through the full chapter to make out the possible ways of doing something by himself/herself
* Written by different authors clearly evident by their different writing style. Publisher should have facilitated (if not enforced) some uniformity to the content style
* Could have been under 450 page book. Putting all the code in appendix doesn't provide much value when the companion code is available, just makes the book more bulky (and costly?)
I will not recommend this book to anybody. It is saddening to see an O'Reilly book of this standard.
--Nafees