Customer Reviews

JSTL in Action

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What the book is:

- the best JSTL tutorial I've found to learn JSTL from

What the book isn't:

- a good reference book if you already know JSTL

I got great value out of the book when I was first learning JSTL, but this book doesn't have the depth to hold my interest as a more proficient JSTL user. The reference material isn't very well formatted, and it can be somewhat difficult to find what I am looking for. Nonetheless. I highly recommend this book as a tool to learn the JSTL.

Good programming books are not rampant. Manning tends to be a great source, however. They've done it again with this book. And, this time, they have the added attraction of a great, adult sense of humour with Shawn Bayern. If you cannot use JSTL with ease after reading this book, then you will be in the minority. I don't know if Bayern makes the hard easy or the easy easy, but it definitely is made easy. I sailed through this book wondering how 400 plus pages could seem like 90 pages. The best thing is that there is a forest for the trees to live in throughout this book. Bayern is a great teacher. I'm going to look at his other book now. Maybe it is good too.

I'm actually awestruck and definitely pleased that Shawn is a developer and writes so well! JSTL is a hot topic these days, especially when it comes to Struts and other JSP Frameworks. Shawn presents an excellent description of JSTL and it's abilities, and stresses how easy it's evaluation language is to use.

As a Struts programmer and architect, This book allowed me to see how many of the Struts-tags overlap with the JSTL, and I believe Shawn's work gave me the inspiration and critical knowledge I need to implement JSTL in my future projects. He treats JSTL tags as what they are -- more tools in my toolbox, not a reason to dump what I already know.

A note to developers - Be careful with JSTL if you have concerns about MVC architecture, because JSTL crosses the line in a couple of places (sql and xml tags). Shawn addresses this quite well in his book.

If you're reading this review, you're probably familiar with, or already programming Struts. This book will most definitely help you stay ahead of the curve and I highly recommend it!

Most of the time I don't bother reading books on bleeding edge technology, but I bought this book for several reasons. One, the book is well written with examples. Two, reading the book is much easier than reading the specifications from Sun. Three, it's a good reference book. Having read the servlet and jsp specs from servlet 1 & jsp .9 to the current versions, interpretting the specification can be a challenge. Those who are interested in JSTL and need an environment that is friendly to web designers/HTML coders should consider this book.
I used to have a small collection of tech books that were poorly written and useless, but JSTL isn't in that category. The book has already proved it's worth and saved time and needless head scratching.

Review
One way to develop dynamic page content on a web application is to use JavaServer Pages technology. This allows you to embed bits of Java code, or scriptlets, within the HTML page. The web server interprets the scriptlet when the page is called and produces the content that is coded. This is all good, but there are common tasks (such as looping) that each developer had to reinvent from scratch each time it was used in a page. To prevent this repetitive coding, a common set of JSP tags were created to allow developers to concentrate on business logic instead of coding structures. This creation is known as the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL). That's what this book is all about...

The book starts with an examination of how JSP and XML tags come together to form the basis of JSTL. This is followed by a number of chapters that cover the different tags that are used to control branching, flow, text formatting, and other various structures. After the basics of JSTL, the author looks at a number of common tasks encountered by JSP developers and how they would be coded using JSTL. Finally, the book wraps up with reference data needed on a regular basis as you use JSTL, such as the API.

The writing is clear and concise, with an abundance of diagrams and code to illustrate the points. The mix of reference, tutorial, and practical examples is perfect, and every developer will be able to use this book in a number of situations.

Websphere developers (both web application and portlet development) will get the most out of this book when it comes to the IBM/Lotus world. The use of JSTL will reduce the code complexity of your JSP pages and speed up your development efforts.

Conclusion
If you are developing JSP pages and haven't looked into the use of the JSTL area, get this book. It will save you time and effort in your coding, and you'll be glad you did.

While the technical specification of JSTL is readable like most hi-tech documents are "readable" (i.e. it left me sometimes a bit puzzled), this book is both deep and full of very useful examples. Sometimes, in my opinion it goes too far (programming a message board with JSTL), but this only goes to show how powerful JSTL really is.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading it: It made a lot of things clearer and there were a couple of times where I thought: "Oh, I didn't know that JSTL could do that!".

I have purchased two JSTL books, and this was the best one by far. It is very practical and relevant for day-to-day development work. I'm suprised at how many times I consult it. My only complaints are that 1. the book is a little dry and 2. I would have liked just a little more conceptual framework to hang all the facts on.

Still, this book is extremely useful and does what it says it would do.

The thing I really liked about the book was lots of examples, that clearly explain the concepts and usage of JSTL. Highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn and understand JSTL without lot of effort!

This is by far the best JSTL Book on the Market at this time. The Book was organized and well written and their were plenty of good examples. I would have liked to have had more Chapters that were aimed at Java Programmer's but that wasn't the purpose of the Book.

This is a good book to learn about how to use JSTL. It has an excellent reference section, and the body of the book explains how to use the JSTL tags with many good example. On the whole, a very useful, readable book. One negative: The author has a sense of humor which some might find odd, and he interjects it throughout the book; at times it's distracting. But if you can get past that, you'll find this to be a good resource.