If this is the first book you read on this topic, you will probably like it better than my 3 stars. And if you program in Java, you will also like it better. Personally, I mostly work in Ruby and have read a lot of material that was similar to this (probably based on this!). So my unfair, subjective rating is that this didn't add a lot to what I already knew, but is a perfectly reasonable version of this type of book.