Explains nothing

I am a (software development) middle manager with a background as a C programmer. Every 2-3 years I'll buy 1 book + products to try to stay relatively current with industry evolution. I bought VB 4.0 & MS Access and was able to use the VB 4.0 documentation alone to build a fairly elaborate application. I bought Borland JDeveloper & Oracle and with the help of Teach Yourself Java in 21 days was able to migrate my application to (i.e. rewrite my application for) Java/Oracle. Now I acquired J2EE from Sun and mySQL with a view to migrating the same application, bought this book, and find that this book is of absolutely no help whatsoever. This book is reliant on downloadable samples (which are now out-of-date and unusuable) and fails to explain what I want: nuts-and-bolts construction of a "Hello World" type program where I hand-craft a JSP, a servlet, a session bean and an entity bean using the mySQL database (which I had up and running within 1 hour of download) to extract the "Hello" and the "World" from 2 separate columns in a database table, and hand-craft the deployment descriptors needed to package & deploy the application.

This book is shelved. When I figure out what I want to learn from other sources, I'm inclined to try to write an alternative text to recoup my wasted $50+.

Other Reviews

• Awesome
• Explains nothing
• The most complete Java2EE book
• At Day 2 you come to a screeching halt
• Terrible book