Inno -E Books
Component Development for the Java Platform
By Stuart Dabbs Halloway
* Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
* Number Of Pages: 304
* Publication Date: 2001-12-15
* Sales Rank: 661590
* ISBN / ASIN: 0201753065
* EAN: 0785342753066
* Binding: Paperback
* Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
* Studio: Addison-Wesley Professional 
Well, I don't think this book deserves 5 stars and here's why:
1) The book provides good description of Class Loaders, reflection and of serialization (I liked them, really) but after that I was expecting to read about, you know, "Component Development", the title of the book ? Like how one divides his application to deployable components, why and when. Nothing about that - author just gave us tools that we can use without providing any further information. But I know Java provides CL, reflection and serialization for many years already - how does it help me to write components ? Where are some real-life examples (besides RMI, EJB and JSP) ?
The chapter about GP (Generative Programming) gives a good description of various approaches about it (and if you know JBoss and it's dynamic invocation stack built with dynamic proxies vs other containers running "rmic" - you understand them even better) but still, I would call this book "Java CL, reflection, serialization and high-level GP overview" - that's exactly the information that I've received from it. Nothing about "component development" besides some basic example in the very beginning.
2) The book spends time and space discussing C++/COM integration with Java and while I understand some will find this information invaluable - I'm sure for most Java developers (and that includes me) this is highly irrelevant.
3) In 2007 it's became outdated in many points as we have Java SE 6 released and 7 upcoming - author only mentions J2SE 1.4.2. Right, many points still hold true but not all of them (does setAccessible(true) allows one to write final fields or not?) and one can never be sure whether what's he's reading is correct today the way it was back in 2001
4) I checked "Java Class File Editor" plugged by the author - it's just a bunch of classes without any documentation (and I've never heard of any bytecode instrumentation guru using this library so it's not of big value after all). So I would call it a "toy project abandoned shortly after
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