I have been delighted to review one of the first books on Java EE 5, which shows the cutting-edge improvements of the platform. APress' "Beginning Java EE 5: From Novice to Professional" by Jim Crume, Kevin Mukhar, James L. Weaver, Chris Zelenak is a very good and well-written book that suits anyone willing to tackle the Java EE 5 platform.

My 8-horseshoes review follows (soon available at Javaranch.com):

The J2EE specification has walked quite a long and sinuous way since its inception in 1998. Over the years, J2EE has grown into a huge beast that has become increasingly tougher to tame. At the same time, other emerging platforms and frameworks, such as .NET and Ruby on Rails, are committed to steal market shares at any costs. To counter this, the Java Enterprise community has been working hard to improve the platform and to deliver another major version, called Java EE 5, whose main focus is to increase the ease of development by significant orders of magnitude.

Even though the new specification is not yet finalized, "Beginning Java EE 5: From Novice to Expert" makes a really great job of introducing the novel and largely revamped platform which now takes full advantage of the brand new features of Java 5. The book introduces all major underlying specifications of the Java EE 5 platform, such as Servlets 2.5 and JSP 2.1, which went through a slightly cosmetic maintenance phase as well as EJB 3.0, whose programming model has been entirely revised and rethought for the third time in 6 years. The book elegantly describes how this third 90° curve finally provides what developers have been asking for. Finally, the authors also delve into the largely improved Web Services support provided by the JAX-WS 2.0 specification.

The great thing about the way this book is organized is that it suits anyone from the novice who's wiling to start learning the Java Enterprise platform to the veteran J2EE developer who's committed to stay up-to-date with the evolution of the platform and the improvements of the underlying specifications.