Comments on Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms and PL/SQL Developers, by D.Mills, P.Koletzke.

On the bright side the text is well written without many misspellings. It has a tutorial format which is easy to follow, starting from chapter 9. The source code available from www.tuhra.com is compatible with all 10g versions of JDeveloper starting from 10.1.3, so that you can build the application presented, from scratch. Moreover, some use cases mentioned in chapter 15 are very useful and can be reusable in many similar user requirements.
On the dark side, the chapters up to 9 are a bore, purely theoretical. The 8th chapter, about bindings is tedious to read and not easy at all to understand. In addition,  some jsp pages are missing from the whole application, such as the jobs.jsp and the help page. Apart from that,  in page 329, there is a screen shot of an application page called reference.jsp, presenting a dynamic menu tree layout, which is very difficult to create on your own, via plain ADF. This highlight page is actually missing from the code too, as mentioned in the following link:
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2022769&#2022769
Apparently, the application page screen shot was created using JHeadstart, and not purely ADF. JHeadstart is an extension for JDeveloper which must be paid for. Furthermore, the whole chapter, 16, which is devoted to demonstrating, or rather promoting, JHeadstart is totally useless for the individual, open source developer. It could have been replaced by a more useful deployment guide to the Oracle Application Server (OAS) instead.
All in all, the book is not recommended unless you are forced to implement for an older J2EE environment. Besides, at the time of this writing the OAS, and JDeveloper 10g is being deprecated, its end of life is approaching and there is always a free online tutorial, if you still need to get started.

Further critical references concerning ADF:

Tales from the trenches by Dr. Dorsey. Coauthor of the JDeveloper 10g hanbook.

Comments on EJB 3 in action, by Debu Panda, Reza Rahman, Derek Lane

On the bright side, the text is most of the times crystal clear, easy to understand and follow the code creation from scratch. The helpful appendix of the book guides the reader to setup the Sun Glassfish application server in minutes, without any trouble. Such easiness really tempts to switch your java integrated development environment (IDE ) to Sun Netbeans. The database scripts given are for Oracle though, not for Derby. The source code of the book runs correctly out of the box with only an exception as mentioned here:
http://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?threadID=37203&tstart=0
Apart from Glassfish, there are also many code versions, suitable for the older Oracle Application Server (oc4j),JBoss and weblogic 10.
On the dark side, the text is IDE neutral, the deployment is done using ant scripts. Many spelling errors also appeared in the text and the huge errata page at Manning site.
All in all, the book is highly recommended, I am looking forward to reading its newer, updated edition!

Comments on Heads first Servlets&Jsp 2nd Edition

On the bright side, the book is written in an unusual way, full of graphics and photos of an oriental martial arts movie, in an attempt to make reading the text, seem like fun. The book is full of exercises and questions to help the reader to memorize whatever is important for passing the exams. The text is clear, easy to understand most of the times, with the exceptions of the chapter about patterns and custom tag development. There also many typographical errors in the text and the questions as well. One should consult the huge error page at O'Reilly.
On the dark side, there is no hands on coding practice, the examples mentioned are deliberately simple, about cats and dogs, or outdated (struts) so that you can not easily reuse any source code from the book. This is no reference book either, as stated by its authors.
All in all, the book prepares you well for the Sun J2EE 1.4 exams, servlet v2.4, jsp v2.0, in a straightforward and funny way, but it certainly needed a greater update on older themes and addition of newer, such as jsf.