R4JD is an important book to read for Java web application developers, whether or not they are planning a move to Rails. The structure of the book is unique in that it explains concepts in Ruby, Rails, and Rake by comparing them to the equivalent functions in Java, Hibernate, Struts, JSP, JUnit, and ant. It is wonderful at helping the developer quickly learn how to do all of the things he or she already knows how to do into the Rails world. Even for the developer who is not considering using Rails at the moment, it provides a quick and useful framework for understanding the differences of the Rails way and anticipate how the Java technology stack will be responding to new ideas about the way web application development can be done. Simply understanding the structure of an end to end Rails application provides a good template for how to build a Java web application with the suite of tools used for comparison.
Specifically, the authors' coverage of the Ruby language is quite good in terms of being very clear and leading the reader from an understanding of how to write Java-style to Ruby to a deeper level of being able to write more idiomatic Ruby code. The coverage of ActiveRecord and Hibernate is quite informative, although it doesn't get into any of the approaches to caching data in Rails, it is a good introduction to the differences (Rails tends to cache views). The section on Controllers using Struts is enough to make me wish I never see another routing configuration xml file again.
One of the primary differences between Java web applications and Rails web applications is that the Java web apps tend to use a lot of configuration files written in XML. While type safety is often listed as something people like about statically typed Java, the book should point out that all of this XML plumbing is not quite type safe either. The magic of Ruby's dynamic nature and more complete object oriented features such as duck typing and mixins help provide an escape for this, where the story is really all in the code.
All in all, this is a very readable technical book. It's a quite a bit more than a reference manual and is filled with generous nuggets of wisdom that have already made me a better developer.