Customer Reviews

Beginning JavaServer Pages

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is the perfect complement to Marty Hall's Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages Vol. 1...."You wont be dissapointed with this book since almost everything is covered here from Servlets,JNDI,JDBC,JAXP and Java Mail....Plus the authors writing is absolutely beginner-friendly...If you want to learn the basics of java however this book is not for you...but then the power of Java really shines on Server-side programming...and plus the J2EE architecture is centered on JSP technology...I would recommend this to anyone who wishes to dwell into web-services programming...One downside i found however was the repetition of several topics such as XML and XSLT however provided with the fact that this is the culmination of several authors work i think with that said the repetition of topics can be forgiven...hell if ya already know the stuff from chapter 6 and its repeated on chapter 8 hell skip it...its that simple....highly recommended for JSP beginners and gurus alike

Beginning JavaServer Pages is an extremely practical guidebook especially recommended for server-side Java Developers, uses explicit instruction, examples, and sample codes to instruct the reader in JSP application basics, development, and applying JSP in J2EE and JSP component development. A technical user's manual that goes into express detail, offering explicit syntax and step-by-step discussion of technical applications.

This is a hefty tome weighing in at 1262 pages. Wrox have a sound reputation for producing excellent programming titles, for programmers by programmers, and this latest offering does not disappoint.

From the onset, it is clearly an outstanding work with a solid emphasis on writing code properly. The book has lucid sections devoted to design patterns, testing, model-view architectures and many other important considerations in good software engineering. This is not just a "sequence, selection, repetition" work but one which distills obvious years of experience. Any reader can have confidence they will be not just a JavaServer Page (JSP) code cutter after finishing, but a good, professional, developer with a mastery of principles than transgress language boundaries.

The book is divided into four broad sections. Part one covers JSP fundamentals. Part two builds on this putting the JSP language knowledge into the framework of modern Web server software development, including coverage of servlets, security, performance and database integration. Part three puts it all together and shows how to build two complete real-world applications: a personalised portal, and an updateable, data-driven shopping cart site. Part IV concludes with appendices and exercise answers.

The book is not simply a standalone volume; Wrox have a hierarchy of Java titles which progress from beginning Java and JavaServer Pages through to advanced J2EE development. That said, this book can be entirely appreciated on its own and is comprehensive and complete in its coverage of JSP. It does not make any assumption of previous programming experience, but at the same time does not bog experienced programmers down with basic fundamentals.

The price is surprisingly reasonable for a book of this quality and size and consequently it is an indispensable purchase for anyone who wishes to develop server-side JSP apps.

The word "Beginning" in the title is optimistic at best. I would not recommend this book for someone new to JSP. I've made it through 14 chapters, and now I'm going to drop this one and find something else. The last several chapters have been extremely frustrating. Too many examples don't work, and many things are not well explained. I've had to find other sources such as java.sun.com to find good explanations for things that are quickly passed over in this book. And I'm a certified J2SE programmer, so I'm not exactly a beginner.

The only IDE that has been mentioned so far is NetBeans 3.6. That's hopelessly out of date. The order of the chapters doesn't even make sense. An exercise in chapter 5 wants you to create and deploy an application, but nothing is mentioned about deployment until chapter 16!

And forget about asking questions on the P2P forums at the wrox website. They are effectively abandoned.

Overall, way too much reading for poor explanations, and poor exercises. You can find something better.

This book is not a click-here teach yourself book. IT professionals know that learning a new area of technology takes effort on their part and requires that they apply prior knowledge to gain new knowledge. At the pro level, we don't spoon-feed you! So yes, you will have to dig into the book's code samples and experiment with them. Having said that, however, this book does a great job of explaining its code samples line by line. As noted by other reviewers, the depth of this book exceeds most other books on JSP. IT professionals know and love WROX as one of the very best publishers of books for professionals.

I have used this book to teach JSP at university level multiple times. The student who is willing to roll up his/her sleeves and dig in soon realizes that this is one of the few books that will be kept once the degree is earned. This book allows me to cover past and present JSP methodologies. Learning past methodologies is critical, as you will find millions of lines of past approach code still in use in the real world, and may even need to convert some of it. My students get hired when they finish this course because of this.

Every time I teach JSP, I look for a new textbook or professional book to replace this book. So far, I have not found anything that comes close to the breadth and depth of this book. I'll be using this book again soon.

JSP is not a simple technology, but it is a powerful one consisting of many approaches and supporting many add-on technologies. You MUST be solid in your knowledge of Java and object-oriented programming. If you are not, you are not ready for JSP, period, no matter which book you use.

I did learn a lot about JSP from this book. I learned how it works and the history of it. I did not, however, learn how to write JSP. This book touts hand-ons but their idea of hands-on is pasting several pages of code in the book and telling you to write it verbatim in your code. It goes over some good tools (such as Ant) but never mentions an IDE or what the best way to go about starting a project is. For the most part it moved very slowly and repeated its self a lot. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be. I do feel like I learned from this book but overall I don't think it was worth my time.

I bought this book expecting that it would be a beginners book, in that it would start you off with some basics and move on from there. I also expected that due to to its size and content, it would be an adequate reference when I progressed beyond the basics. I expected this to be a fairly "easy read" since I have substantial backgroud programming in ASP. Unfortunately, the book is fairly disorganized and cotains a fair amount of technical rambling. Definitely more confusing more than educational.

In essence, I consider this more of a reference manual than the learning book that I had hoped for and I will be buying another beginners book.

I'm about 180 pages into this book, and if the next 800 pages are anything like the first 180, this is not the way to start using JSP. I also have the Ivor Horton Beginning Java book (also by Wrox), and it is a far better tutorial. After going through 5 chapters in both books, the Ivor Horton one actually taught me something whereas this book stammers on about how great JSTL and EL are without giving any good explanations of anything. The examples in this book are childishly simple AND not very well explained, which to me is the worst of both worlds. If you're brand-new to server-side programming, you'll wonder why after 5 chapters you still can't do anything. If you're familiar with other server-side languages, you'll wonder why they included the first 200 pages.

If you want to learn Java, go with the Ivor Horton book. If you really want to learn JSP, I'd look elsewhere.

I may update this review after going through more chapters - maybe it's just the intro that's poorly done.

The book is extremly good, it explain everything about JSP and other new technologies, i really recomend it