I got the chance to look at the digital edition of Adams newest book. All "Bien works" promise real world knowledge and code you need to develop lean and maintainable Java EE 5 / 6 applications. Therefore I was quite excited to see his new book.
Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices guides you to efficient code and best practices in a structured way, with real world examples.
The first two chapter sum up, what you should already know. Basic JEE principles (EJB, JPA, JMS, JCA, JTA, Dependency Injection, Convention Over Configuration, Interceptors, REST), Transactions, Isolation Levels, Core J2EE patterns. In short, this is more like a "history of the internet section".
Chapters three to five realy deal with patterns. Starting with business layer patterns for domain driven and service oriented architectures, over to patterns for integration of asynchronous, legacy, or incompatible resources and finaly infrastructural patterns for eager-starting of services, thread tracking and more.
Chapter six finaly is about pragmatic Java EE Architectures. With a discussion of superfluous patterns and outdated best practices. Things like DAOs, Business Delegates, Data Transfer Objects extensive layering, indirections and more. Beside this, the introduces lean and pragmatic service and domain driven architectures, based on the discussed patterns.
As a conclusion: A good book to start over again with patterns in JEE6. If you skip the first two parts and focus on the "pattern" itself, it can be a very usefull ressource for you. As always, Adam's books are fun to read and easy to understand even for non native speakers :)
The online PDF version is available from Lulu.com.
(If you use the the promo code: "README" you will save 10% off)
Have a look at http://press.adam-bien.com/, too.
