I just got to read an advance copy of Beginning POJOs: From Novice to Professional, the new book by Brian Sam-Bodden. My review follows.

Missourians -- residents of the "Show Me State" -- are sure to appreciate this unusual book on lightweight Java development with "Plain Old Java Objects." In a fast-paced 10 chapters, Brian Sam-Bodden builds a single complete application, all the way through. Believe it or else, he starts with a detailed design, then talks about fundamental tools like Eclipse and Ant, and before you know it he's implemented the persistence and business tiers. Screenshots and detailed instructions will help you get your environment installed and set up in no time.

The first five chapters of the book are astonishingly linear as the application is developed to this point, with each technology choice presented as a fait accompli. In this day of political correctness and cultural relativism, many authors bend over backwards to consider all the alternatives to every decision they make, and I felt that Sam-Bodden's approach was incredibly refreshing. Eclipse, Ant, Hibernate, EJB3 on JBoss. Take it or leave it.

I was therefore almost disappointed when, in Chapters 6 and 7, he considers several different alternative implementations of the business and presentation tiers. Still, showing how to use Tapestry and especially Spring offsets the raised eyebrows some of you might have on hearing that a book on POJOs was advocating using EJBs -- even though the radically reworked EJB3 specification does indeed let you use Plain Old Java Objects to implement the business layer.

From this point, the book gets more conventional, with the traditional tacked-on chapter about testing that nevertheless asks you to do testing as an integral part of development.

Although some of the technology choices and development approaches may stretch your personal definition of the term "lightweight," this is still the best book on end-to-end development of modern enterprise applications that I've seen. If you have a hint of the Missourian in you, and you'd like someone to show you how things are done, this book was written with you in mind.