Building an EJB - Java Application Development on Linux - page 503

few small changes required in the ejb-jar.xml config file. (What is the
ejb-jar.xml config file? It is part of the configuration information used to
deploy your EJB, the topic of the next chapter.) But there are some serious
complications with entity beans that involve retrieving the bean's data from
a “backing store”—for example, a database—and writing it back. There are
many good references on these topics, and we mention our favorites in the
next section.

22.5 R ESOURCES

These are some of our favorite resources for learning about and dealing with
EJBs. All of these give much more extensive examples that we have space for,
and we encourage you to look at one or more of them.

• J2EE and Beyond by Art Taylor (Prentice Hall PTR, ISBN
0-13-141745-2) gives a very good overview of all of the pieces of J2EE.
At over 1,000 pages, it's no small book, but it covers a lot more than
just EJBs.
• Enterprise JavaBeans Component Architecture: Designing and Coding Enter-
prise Applications by Gail Anderson and Paul Anderson, Sun Microsystems
Press, ISBN 0-13-035571-2. At only 435 pages it is the most concise of
the three, with the tightest focus and an emphasis on the code.
• Applied Enterprise JavaBeans Technology by Kevin Boone, Sun Microsystems
Press, ISBN 0-13-044915-6. At just over 700 pages, it is midway between
the other two titles. Like the Taylor book, it covers some related technolo-
gies, but gives more depth to EJBs than Taylor, as that is its focus. It pro-
vides more examples than the Andersons, but its examples are not any
deeper, just broader.