Major problems:
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Willey (Hungryminds) do not support this book any more. No supplemental web site, no book available on their web, isbn unknown. Author doesn't provide any support (http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/about/resume.html) on his site.
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Book lacks complete runnable examples. I don't care which tools should I use to run (ant, eclipse, websphere, jbuilder - all trials available).
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It is not for beginners, it is not for gurus. I respect the good books for beginners. A good beginner book can make a guru out of a newbie, depends on the author's approach and reader's way of learning. If they match, you have win-win combination.
-Too much introductions in each chapter, e.g. related to LDAP, Novell Directory Services product was introduced in 1994, bla bla bla, it includes many good things, bla bla, it is shame that programers dont benefit of its capabilities, bla bla. - Oh ! Come on, who cares ! Give us the real stuff, give us examples and show us how to improve them, show us advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Give us some skeletons. No sencences starting "In 1998...".
I wish this book was written as some of my favourites. After all, this is not a bad book, but you will need at least 5 other books to learn what you need to know.
So far O'Reilly's Struts book (isbn 0596006519) helped me to integrate struts and ejb. Addison Wesley Pr, Websphere related book helped me out with IDE (032118579X), and several IBM red books helped me to learn what I needed.
Finally best book ever written, with the best examples, attitude, is isbn 0072226846. It is a j2se book. By my opinion this should be a new standard of writing books. Exact, sharp, smart, examples, rules, best practices, etc. If only they could write a j2ee book.
Finally 2 starts go to this book. I never rated any j2ee book with 4 or 5 stars, so 2 should be good.
My big disappointment about many j2ee books is that the best articles and examples and answers to my questions are found on the internet. I am still looking for a j2ee top book.