Recently i read “Beginning Java EE 7”, book from Java User Group Leader and Java Champion Antonio Goncalves.

This book  is a very neat introduction to JavaEE 7 getting into details in course of each chapter and putting everything together in a hands-on experience at the end.It is starting with an historical intro to JavaEE and then going through all components of it in a quite structured way.

It is a quite thick book(500 pages) divided into 15 chapters.Each chapter picks an essential component of JavaEE and gets into details using a bottom-up approach.Starting with a general introduction to JavaEE7,book goes all the way through Context and Dependency Injection,Bean Validation,Java Persistence API and ORM in first 6 chapters.Next 3 chapters cover EJB’s in every sense includingTransactions,Callbacks,Security Services.Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 are about front-end:JSF and Navigation.The 12th chapter of the book is about XML and JSON processing and what JavaEE 7 brought in.Chapter 13 is named “messaging” and leaves no open questions about JMS  and Message Driven Beans. As to the last two chapters;they  are dedicated to Web Services (SOAP and REST).

What i liked most about this book is the way it follows through each chapter. It starts with very simple and clear definition.Then it gives us some historical background of that component along with an overview of related Java Specification.Then we get introduced to what is new about that component in Java EE 7.And only after these steps we dig into broader details and start feeling the joy of coding.Personally i like this kind of well-planned and structured approach hence i enjoyed this book a lot.Moreover, it is a very contentful reference book.

One improvement could be to compare JavaEE with the current frameworks in place (like Spring) in much more detail.Since open source frameworks on Enterprise Java are arguably prevalent in the industry,it would be nice to have to see differences and JavaEE’s advantages over them.

All in all,i certainly recommend Antonio Goncalves’ book to all Java/JavaEE developers.It is definitely worth reading and if you are not into reading a few hundred pages,worth using as a reference book.