Customer Reviews

Jakarta Struts Pocket Reference

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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Review
I recently worked my way through a Struts tutorial and really liked the approach for building web applications. However, the Struts architecture has a lot of configuration files and standard components that are interrelated when building an application. It's difficult to keep all the pieces in the right place in your mind as you're first coding with Struts. This is where the Jakarta Struts Pocket Guide comes into play.

The authors use a straightforward, documentation style of writing to give you just the core information on all the pieces that make up the Struts architecture. There's no conversational instruction on how to use or how to learn Struts. It is assumed you have the basic knowledge and need to understand the details of each piece. The format usually shows a piece of Java or XML code, explains what that piece does, and then documents each parameter that comes into play. So instead of wading through 50 pages of a book to figure out the web.xml file, you can find the core information here in six pages. You may need additional resources if you want to learn more about a particular feature, but this book will quickly show you that the feature exists and what it is meant to do.

If you're looking to learn Struts for the first time, hold off on this book until you've gone through a learning guide of some sort (like Programming Jakarta Struts by Chuck Cavaness). You'll need that level of instruction to get up to speed on the architecture. Once you have that down, you'll be able to use the pocket guide to find answers to your day-to-day questions on how the different parts work.

Conclusion
If you have already worked your way through a Struts book or if you use Struts on a daily basis, you'll find this a valuable little guide to give you focused answers on a timely basis.

If the reader is not completely new to Struts, this book with the examples zipped with the Struts framework might be enough to develop a Struts based application.

The book has two main parts:

Intro to the usage of Struts and its most important components. (35 pages)
This part is quite good in relation to its size. The Validator framework could get more space.

Tag Reference. (85 pages)
Includes many short examples. Tiles are also included.

Covers all of the bare bones and some of the guts of the topic in 125 pages. Not for complete beginners, but if youve read the limited docs on the web then this is the next step. Covers web and config xml in just enough detail, explains, form beans, beans in general, actions validation. The tag reference is 70/125 pages which makes sense as this so important to a struts app. Does justice to the html and logic tags. Great size for the desk or train. More books should be in this cut down format - it stops the authors rambling and gets to the point. for USD-10 you cant go wrong. Well edited - no mistakes. I got this with another (not as good but bigger) struts book and the two complement quite well. Go for it.

I have at least four separate struts books, and this is the one I keep turning to whenever I have a question about syntax or properties. It lists them all, starting each tag libraries section with a description of common attributes. It then goes into the separate tags in each library and their specific attributes, with example usage. The tag references I've seen in other books were no where near as complete as what is inside this one.

This book also includes notes on the usage of different action types, action forms, etc. All in all, an excellent reference.

Seller is great, fast delivery, like new, reasonable/low price and shipping costs.

Like a lot of OReilly books, this book gets to wordy.

I am new to struts and was very happy with how easy this book is to find information quickly in.

Explain all details about Struts, easy to understand and to apply in real proyects.