Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) are the server-side core of J2EE application development. This guide discusses common programming problems (referred to as "antipatterns") encountered by developers when working with EJB. Although acknowledging EJB's shortcomings, the authors demonstrate that it may be applied effectively to build distributed, transactional, scalable systems that solve real problems. Coverage includes sessions, messaging APIs, persistence, and performance tuning. Tate is also the author of Bitter Java (2002).