Special Edition Using Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 starts with a description of how Enterprise JavaBeans fits into the big picture of J2EE development, then covers such topics as:

Locating EJB's using JNDI

Managing data with EJB Query Language

Building JMS applications using the new Message-driven Bean

Planning EJB applications using design patterns

Later chapters describe advanced development topics including interoperability, horizontal services and clustering. Throughout the book, the authors construct a component-based auction web site using the J2EE architecture as a practical example.