I bought this book because I needed an overview of J2EE technology, and I wanted something with a lot of breadth. With the notable exception of web services, I feel that this book delivered on that promise.
After reading the book, it will still be necessary to read and learn the various technologies in more depth, but the book provides a good roadmap.
The strength of the book is its breadth, covering everything from servlets to EJBs to logging APIs to build tools. Because the book covers so much, it is able to give a sense of how all of these technologies fit together for web application development.
The weakness of the book is its uneven quality. Some sections, such as the one on servlets, are written in great detail, and other sections, such as the one on web services, are simply a consolidation of material from other documents, poorly explained.
My biggest complaint about this book, in the context of it being an overview or roadmap, is that the section on web services is awful. I doubt the author understood much about the technologies in that section because a lot of material is copied from other sources without adequate explanation, and the text has the look of a padded english essay. ("This attribute is another very important part of processing.") In addition, some of the inline editing comments from prepublication are still in the text! ("Deleted, if so WHY?---JG") JG makes a few appearances in the web services chapters. There are also clearly some copy/paste errors in these sections.
Aside from that, there is the occasional poor programming practice, such as classes declared with "extends Object".
On balance, however, the good outweighs the bad, and I am now happily oriented, and ready to learn some of these technologies in more detail.
