I remember a couple of years back, when I was between jobs, I decided learning Java EE might improve my chances in the job market. I found a PDF book called "Th

I remember a couple of years back, when I was between jobs, I decided learning Java EE might improve my chances in the job market. I found a PDF book called "The Java EE Tutorial" (originally published by Addison-Wesley, don't remember the author(s)) on Sun's web site and fetched it. I first was kind of shocked that a book with the word "Tutorial" in the title had about 1100 pages. What really made me walk away, though, was the freaking flow chart that accompanied the book's table of contents, showing how the reader should work his or her way through the book depending on prior knowledge. There are probably situations where Java EE is the way to go, but those are probably the kind of situations where your application is going to be so huge and complex that the bloat and complexity of Java EE is not going to make much of a difference.