I'm not familiar with that book but 2000 was a loooooong time ago
with respect to Java enterprise development. It's hard to imagine
that there would be much relevant to today's landscape except for
maybe the stuff on servlets, and even that will be dated.
A book on Java EE 5 (the latest version) that is free for the taking
is "The Java EE 5 Tutorial", linked from
http://java.sun.com/javaee/reference/index.jsp. But IMO, that book
is not much of a tutorial--it plows through the material without
providing a lot of rationale for why things are as they are. It
seems like a reference written by technical writers who haven't put
the technology to use themselves. It describes the trees but you
might read the whole thing and not really understand the forest. I
think Sun could have done better.
It's important to recognize that Java EE applications vary widely in
their stacks. One might use Struts for the user interface and EJB2
for persistence. Another might use Tapestry for the ui, Hibernate
for persistence, and the Spring framework as glue. Another might use
EJB3 (where persistence is completely different from EJB2) and
JavaServer Faces. I think it's reasonable to be say that the only
essential element in Java web development is the servlet and there
may even be some Java frameworks that aren't servlet-based.
Because Java EE provides a lot of flexibility in the stack perhaps
one approach is to seek out elements that are well described. With
that in mind I can recommend "EJB 3 in Action" by Panda, Rahman, and
Lane. I also like "Core JavaServer Faces, 2e" by Geary and
Horstmann. Another JSF book I like is "JavaServer Faces" by Bergsten.
At the recent No Fluff Just Stuff in Phoenix a show-of-hands survey
of various Java web technologies showed that just about everybody was
using Spring in one way or another. I haven't seen the second
edition of Walls and Braidenbach's "Spring In Action" but the first
edition is terrific. I've found that "J2EE Development without EJB"
by Johnson and Hoeller does an excellent job of providing the "Why?" of Spring.
But having said all that, I must quote Todd's response to your
question: "Look at Groovy and grails. ..."
Java web development reminds of the mainframe world I was in when
going to college. Vastly complicated subsystems, thousands of pages
of reference material, there wasn't much you couldn't do, and things
were very efficient but nothing was easy. Then we got a UNIX machine
in the lab I worked in. There were some things you couldn't do, and
UNIX couldn't support as many users on an equivalent amount of
hardware but lots of common things that should be easy were easy.
I see a lot of things in the philosophy of Grails (and Ruby on Rails)
that remind me of that early UNIX world. And you might be able to
get Grails or Rails into your brain and have enough room left to let
you focus on some science, too! :)
p.s.
I hope some others will come in with some recommendations on ways to
get up to speed with Java EE -- I know there are a lot of experienced
Java EE developers on this list.
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