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Although the title seems to be a game of buzzword bingo, it is an accurate description of the contents of this book. It begins with a quick start to EJB, JTS and OTS programming and this is where my first issue with the book arises - why are (simple, yet not trivial) programming examples being launched onto the reader before the technologies have been introduced? Will the choice to make the

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object an Entity Bean mean anything to the reader until they've read the second last chapter of the book? I seriously doubt it. It seems the first chapter has been added as an attempt to glue together the separate sections of the book. The second chapter, an overview of distributed transaction processing, is effective groundwork for the rest of the book and even includes a small section detailing why TP monitors are needed and when they are effective. Aside from some mad random characters appearing midway through titles, the chapters on the CORBA OTS are well written and do not waste the reader's time with boilerplate CORBA background material. The following chapter 'Programming with the OTS' guides the user through a 100 page example of a flight booking system An in depth introduction to the principles of transactional computing, with an overview of the current standards, technologies and product families in the field. There follows a large section on OTS and JTS half overview, half programmers guide. Finally the book introduces Enterprise JavaBeans and presents a non-trivial example to demonstrate programming with it.