Customer Reviews

Core Java Web Server

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I never write any book review after I finish reading a book. However, this book is so bad that I decide to write a few comments to warn other readers. There are several reasons that you should not buy this book. (1) It is badly-written. I sometimes find that some of these figures are not correctly labelled. Authors should find a good software to write their book. (2) It is poorly-organized. After I read it twice, it is still very hard for me to find some information quickly. (3) It is out-of-date. Its servlet API is version 2.0. A few examples that you read cannot run at all on Java Web Server 2.0. It is talking about Java Web Server 1.1.1. The current of Java Web server version is 2.0. (4) There are many better books than this one. After I have read quite a few Servlet books, I find that the best one is probably Professional Java Server Programming. The Second best is Jason Hunter's Servlet Programming which has a nice collection of useful servlets. (5) The examples in this book are trivial.

It is not really worthing reading it.

This is an excellent book from start to end. I don't own the Java Web Server, so I use Apache with JRun and the examples in this book work great with my environment.

A significant amount of the examples that I saw on the SUN site included HTTP servlets that did the bulk of their work by overriding the service method.

When I read the chapter on HTTP servlets I learned how to extend the HttpServlet class and how to override the doGet, doPost and other methods to "cleanly" support different HTTP methods. This was worth the price of the book by itself.

I didn't understand everything in the Http Servlet chapter until I went back and read the chapter on the HTTP protocol. That was very useful as well.

There are examples in this book that I've never seen before. For example, I never knew what JNDI was and I always wanted to learn XML. This book has great coverage of both JNDI and XML and shows you how to code servlets that use this powerful technology.

I don't know much about object oriented programming either. This book introduced me to a significant amount of programming paradigms called "design patterns" that are very useful. There is a chapter on session management that uses a design pattern called "state" to provide a very unique and very extendable architecture for a JNDI-based servlet. I am employing this exact architecture in my own project and it works extremely well and is very extendable.

The authors of this book really put their minds together to produce a book that includes a unique set of examples that cannot be found elsewhere.

I recommended this book to a friend that is a Security guru (a topic which I know nothing about). He said the coverage on Security was excellent.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone that wants to make a living programming servlets like I do.

I read this book, and I found it a refreshing change from other web books that cover the *same* "shopping card applications" and "how to make efficient JDBC calls from a servlet" topics. For instance, in the Appendix on XML, the authors write a servlet that generates CDF files for an entire web site. As someone who already knows how to do JDBC, I found this to be a good example of how much different this book was from other servlet books (and I think you will too).

Core Java Web Server is excellent because it covers, in detail, the basics of running a Java Web Server, and also fully explains innovative and interesting uses of the server. Both the language and examples show a clear attempt to communicate to readers of all levels, from the beginner to the advanced Java programmer. (The text itself is written in a light manner, not too complicated, but also not insultingly simple.) The book is also commendable because it doesn't shy away from errors - any errors encountered by the authors are explained to the readers, with the appropriate workarounds.

The book begins with a discussion of the installation and configuration of the Java Web Server. These configuration comments are also sprinkled throughout the rest of the book where necessary. I particularly appreciated that it was explained how to make each configuration through the graphical user interface, and through text files.

The heart of the book covers Java servletts. Each chapter introduces a new aspect of servletts, with descriptions of the classes and methods used, and an example. The examples are working servletts, all with full source code and documentation, which occasionally build upon previous examples to construct sizeable programs.

The examples themselves are inventive and new. For instance, rather than introduce another shopping cart script, the chapter on HTTP sessions implements an LDAP interface. It greatly broadened my knowledge on an important topic which is becoming a great force on the internet.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in Java or web programming.

This is an excellent coverage of the Java Web server. If you are at all interested in SERVLETS, I recommend that you buy this book. You may or may not want to actually use Java Web server for deployment, but you get a great explanation of servlets and lots of info on the JWS to help you make a decision which web server to use. The discussion on Java/HTML page compilation is also interesting.

If you currently use ASP, you owe it to yourself to check out servlets and server-side scripting in Java, to see another solution with perhaps less glitz and instant gratification, but a lot more robustness and scalability.

I'd like to contradict the gentleman from Hawaii--I don't work at Sun and never used JWS before, and I found the book very easy to read. You do have to know Java, of course. If you read Core Java, you will definitely be able to follow this book.

This text assumes much too much knowledge. You would either (A) Have had to work at Sun, or (B) program in Java with the web server all day to understand this book. I would consider myself an expert in Java, and I was not able to follow this book. Chapters 1 and 2 are good, but after that, they start talking about things that are meant for a part II or III. It's really too bad this book was so complex.

This book is so outdated now! It's poorly written, but I learned at least the basics. I still cannot write a servlet if I had to, but I did learn what a servlet is. I'd buy another Java Web Server book before this one.

This is not a bad book -- it contains some useful information concerning JWS and servlets.

However, the book was written by 2 college students, and it shows. The writing is juvenile, with way too much injection of the author's personalities into the book. A "brat" example, discussions of "cool" websites vs. uncool ones, figures with captions like "Gads! I can't connect!" and "Yup! It's plain text, all right!", sections of the book with titles like "Java Web Server, We Have a Problem" are a few examples.

If you can stomach writing like this ...

"Uh oh! Why did we get a NullPointerException, especially in code we didn't write? (We inherited the code for getServletContext from GenericServlet!)"

... then you might be able to get something out of the book. As for me, an hour of reading was all I could stand.

A note to the authors: Please remove the exclamation point from your keyboards.

Core Java Web Server is excellent because it covers, in detail, the complete Servlet API on an experienced level, rather than just the basics, which can be found in the API docs. Both the language and examples show a clear attempt to communicate to readers of the more experienced level. The book is also commendable because it doesn't shy away from errors - any errors encountered by the authors are explained to the readers, with the appropriate workarounds.

The book begins with a discussion of the installation and configuration of the Java Web Server. These configuration comments are also sprinkled throughout the rest of the book where necessary. I particularly appreciated that it was explained how to make each configuration through the graphical user interface, and through text files.

The heart of the book covers Java Servlets. Each chapter introduces a new aspect of Servlets, with descriptions of the classes and methods used in sample code. The examples are working Servlets, all with full source code and documentation, which occasionally build upon previous examples to construct sizeable programs.

The examples themselves are inventive and new. For instance, rather than introduce another shopping cart script, the chapter on HTTP sessions implements an LDAP interface. It greatly broadened my knowledge on an important topic which is becoming a great force on the internet.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in Java or web programming.

Finally, this book does not have tons of API documentation in the appendix that can be found on the developer site (what a waste of paper). Great book!

Looks like the Minnesota reader flipped to the wrong page. The O'Reilly book with the non-compiling examples is called "Java Servlet Programming" :)