Book excerpts:

Authorities on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Ed Roman and his team, deliver an indispensable developer's perspective on what is fast becoming the dominant technology for building server-side applications. This second edition covers not only the latest features of the major new release of the EJB specification, EJB 2.0, but also expands coverage to include more advanced programming tips, techniques and topics of interest to enterprise developers. Readers will learn everything they need to jumpstart their EJB development, from the basics of EJB architecture to developing transactional, scalable, and secure multiuser enterprise applications.

Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans is considered to be a 'hardcore' book on EJB, as it goes into the deepest details regarding EJB design like Clustering and Transaction issues while avoiding the pitfall of detailing a certain Application Server. It also has great introductory tutorials on other EJB issues like JNDI and CORBA-IIOP, where other books seem to fall short.