Audience

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Put succinctly, this book is for anyone who is interested in picking up solid experience in the Java Enterprise APIs. Note that I use the word "solid." It's one thing to learn an API; it's another thing to learn an API so well that you know which areas to use and which areas to stay away from. That doesn't mean the material in this book will turn you into a J2EE expert overnight ”obviously, learning any development environment takes many months of development experience. However, after reading some of these chapters, you should be able to get a feel for the right and wrong approaches to tackling common problems in a particular API space. After all, you're likely learning from other people's mistakes.

One important point that should be made is that these chapters are not tutorials for learning the java Enterprise APIs. For that, you should consult a wide array of books from O'Reilly that cover each Java Enterprise API (see Chapter 1 for an exhaustive list). However, the authors expect that you will have at least some degree of familiarity with the Enterprise APIs in each chapter, even if you don't consider yourself ready to give presentations on J2EE programming at the next JavaOne conference. Obviously, it helps if you've done some programming with that particular API before. If you're reasonably familiar with the structure of the Java Enterprise APIs, you shouldn't feel lost when reading any of these chapters.

I l @ ve RuBoard