Chapter 1, Getting Started will show you how to install and run JBoss. Then Chapter 2, The JBoss Server - A Quick Tour will provide a quick tour of the server directory structure and layout, the key configuration files and services. Finally, Chapter 3, About the Example Applications introduces the J2EE tutorial code that is used throughout out the book.

Moving on to the examples, Chapter 4, The Duke’s Bank Application introduces the Duke’s Bank application from the Sun J2EE Tutorial. You will see JBoss in action get some exposure simple configuration and deployment issues. Chapter 5, J2EE Web Services adds web services to the application. We work through how to expose EJB methods from the Duke’s Bank application through web services and then call them with a Java client.

After that, Chapter 6, JMS and Message-Driven Beans and Chapter 7, Container-Managed Persistence show additional applications showing JMS messaging with message-driven beans and a more in-depth container-managed persistence example.

Chapter 8, Using other Databases explores database configuration using MySQL and Oracle as the database. We end with Chapter 9, Using Hibernate, which shows how to use Hibernate with JBoss. The example applies Hibernate persistence to one of the earlier applications.

Of course, that barely scratches the surface of what you can do with JBoss. Once you feel comfortable with the information here, the JBoss 4 Application Server Guide can take you the rest of the way to total mastery of the JBoss.