Just finished Rod Johnson’s excellent and very accessible book Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. What I think this book does best is provide one with a good introduction and overview of:
- IoC containers
- MVC frameworks
- OR Mapping
- Unit testing (covers Mock objects as well)
- AOP
- Vertical versus Horizontal scaling
Having taken a 2 year hiatus from Java (and EJB) programming, I came back to find the java architecture/framework landscape vastly improved but with a lot to learn (namely IoC, MVC beyond Struts, AOP, and Unit testing). I was also thrilled to find a good open-source OR mapping alternative to Toplink and Cocobase (the latter of which I used for 3 years). This is the 3rd book I’ve read on these topics and so far my favorite!