The tour of the EJB component model presented here centers on several beans created and tested for a travel reservation system in a fictitious cruise ship company. The samples are just right in scale, large enough to test out key concepts in design and deployment, but small enough to be comprehensible, even to those who are not Java experts. The author pays close attention to the real-world issues of deployment with EJBs (as well as the differences among the vendor application servers that run them).

While there are enough details in Java syntax for designing both entity and session beans for the developer, sections on design here will please those who manage projects without delving much into code. Later, the author shows various ways to design entity and session beans. (For instance, entity beans can allow their bean containers to handle the details of connecting to a database, or they can do it themselves. This book demonstrates both approaches.) When it comes to session beans (which "wire" together entity beans to do real work), the author's introduction to managing state and transactions is also a standout. Tips for performance and reusability close out the book.

In all, Enterprise JavaBeans provides an engaging tour of one of the most promising component technologies. It's technically astute, but thoroughly approachable too, and can serve the needs of any manager or Java developer considering EJBs for future projects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) basics, distributed architectures, Component Transaction Monitors (CTMs), bean-containers, home and remote bean interfaces, resource management, configuring EJB servers, entity beans, JNDI, container-managed and bean-managed persistence, session beans, stateless and stateful beans, transactions, design and performance hints.

Though he does provide a conceptual introduction to ADSI and the services implemented in Active Directory, Eck's book is all about code. Code listings appear in quantity. It's one recipe after another, collectively covering hundreds of administration tasks, with minimal commentary on each solution. After all, this is a book for system administrators, and the idea is that they're not so much reading to become programmers as to see the assortment of tools they can use to solve problems.

Though more explanation of the code wouldn't hurt, administrators will be very pleased with the work Eck has done on their behalf. Typical solutions include scripts that add a user to a group, retrieve a computer's processor type, enumerate the groups a user belongs to, and reset all locked-out user accounts in a domain, plus a pair that start and stop an Internet Information Services (IIS) site. Many more scripts populate the pages of this book and its supporting Web site. --David Wall

Topics covered: Active Directory and the Active Directory Service Interfaces version 2.5 (ADSI 2.5), with emphasis on programs that manipulate users, groups, computers, services, and various resources automatically. Other programs perform administrative work on the Internet Information Services (IIS) metabase, Internet sites, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services. ADSI and VBScript references appear as appendices.