Rod Johnson's book, "J2EE Design and Development" is so hot that Amazon charges almost $2.00 extra over the list price.  Two factors contribute to this, it's hard to find the book because the publisher (i.e. Wrox) is bankrupt and that it's simply a good pragmatic book.

( A bit of a disclaimer, I haven't read the whole book cover to cover, I'm basing this review on the parts that interests me.  Afterall, I rarely every read a whole book, who has the time! )

Rod's book is refreshing in that it's one of the few J2EE books (possibly the only) that emphasizes the phrase "J2EE != EJB".  As a matter of fact, that's the topic of the first chapter.  When I read this, I realized that this book would lead to some pragamtic insight on how to leverage J2EE. 

Rod discuses alternatives to Entity Beans in the form of OR Mapping solutions, JDO or JDBC.  In fact, the book presents its own JDBC Framework, this is possibly the most innovative part of the entire book.  He rightly observes the sophistication of OR mapping solutions over Entity Beans.  However, I'm dismayed over his recommendation of JDO over OR Mapping solutions.  On the otherhand, the book consumes most of its pages explaining Rod's own JDBC framework, rather than presenting the more standard alternatives. 

The book has barely any material on Message Driven Beans (MDB) and doesn't mention anything about JCA.  These two topics seem to me as one of the most promising J2EE technologies. 

Finally, the book goes in to detail about web-tier technologies, even presenting its own MVC framework.  I didn't really read much of this part, however he presented some intriguing benchmarks.  I knew that the JSP compiler generated alot of gunk, but who would have known that it may be actually two times slower than velocity!

In summary, the book explains J2EE technology in the context of building a real application.  The coverage of the book and application that is developed is the usual "date entry and presentation" type application.  It's indeed surprising, that even for such a simple domain, the author had to resort to building his own framework.  That's an indictment of the flaws of Entity Beans, and the lack of Java standardization with regards to MVC frameworks.

My final recommendation, buy the book.