This book explains and demonstrates the fundamentals of the EJB 3.0 and Java Persistence programming models. Although EJB makes application development much simpler, it is still a complex technology that requires a great deal of time and study to master. This book provides a straightforward, no-nonsense explanation of the underlying technology, Java™ classes and interfaces, the component model, and the runtime behavior of EJB. It does not include material on previous versions of the specification, however.

Although this book focuses on the fundamentals, it's not a "dummies" book. EJB is an extremely complex and ambitious enterprise technology. While using EJB may be fairly simple, the amount of work required to understand and master EJB is significant. Before reading this book, you should be fluent in the Java language and have some practical experience developing business solutions. Experience with distributed object systems is not a must, but you will need some experience with JDBC (or at least an understanding of the basics) to follow the examples in this book. If you are unfamiliar with the Java language, I recommend Learning Java; this book was formerly Exploring Java (both from O'Reilly). If you are unfamiliar with JDBC, I recommend Database Programming with JDBC and Java (O'Reilly). If you need a stronger background in distributed computing, I recommend Java Distributed Computing (O'Reilly).

This book is organized into two parts: the technical manuscript, followed by the JBoss workbook. The technical manuscript explains what EJB is, how it works, and when to use it. The JBoss workbook provides step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and running the examples from the manuscript on the JBoss 4.0 Application Server.