The Java SOA cookbook, by Eben Hewitt

On the bright side the cook book is well written, in American English, with some spelling errors.The error page of the book presents at the moment only unconfirmed errata:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/errataunconfirmed.csp?isbn=9780596520731
The book consists of a series of  useful stand alone ...dishes; articles structured like this: specific problem, relevant solution, discussion of java code, criticism and alternatives. The reader may not study the book from the start of the menu to the end page sequentially, one might well consult the book about everyday tasks, ie finding a specific file in jarred libraries in linux, and only that. The ...chef expresses his opinion openly about purity of ingredients, ie using cookies is not ReST style programming, uses mainly open source tools to cook; such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Glassfish, .Net clients and some weblogic, but sadly for oracle fans, no flavour of JDeveloper at all! However, the author is not prejudiced against oracle products, as he praises the enterprise service bus.
On the dark side, some of the recipes are incomplete, probably due to space restrictions, meaning that  sometimes the input to a servlet is not dynamic; fed by a database but static, hard coded values in a constructor of a convenience class. Moreover, the source code for each chapter offered on line is all pasted in a single file, not separate class files, thus finding the snippet you need can be time consuming.
All in all, this is a very useful cookbook, presenting advanced java  version 1.6 code, practical solutions to real life problems, excluding design patterns. It offers plenty of food for thought, as it tries to answer  a daily question asked by the vast majority of women, developers and chefs for centuries: what shall we cook today? Bon Appetit ladies and gentlemen!