Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, makes it simple, October 11, 2002
This review is from: Mastering Jakarta Struts (Paperback)
This was a great book. It talks in great depth, not only about Struts, but also about J2EE in general. I would have called myself an upper-intermediate Java programmer when I picked up this book, but an a total newbie to J2EE. I put away my "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" (Hall) and "Enterprise JavaBeans (Monson-Haefel) books that were far too difficult to read in favor of this book's simple approach. It was AWESOME that he went through each and every one of the Struts JSP custom tags, describing their usage, and the attributes of each tag. I found this incredibly useful. I agreed that the examples in the book were real-world, and I found them effective in helping solidify my understanding. I was especially pleased with the time he spent on database access. This is documentation that is hard to find with Struts (and, frankly, with many Java application frameworks). But, there were some difficulties about the book that I didn't quite understand: 1. His database-access code is poorly written. He doesn't reuse any of the JDBC code. He isn't writing a book on a JDBC persistence layer API, I realize, but it made things difficult to follow as I focused on the code deficiences. An exercise for the reader to develop, I guess. 2. The code, as it is written in the book (and downloaded from the web site) doesn't execute without exceptions upon deployment to my JBoss container. If you're going to publish code in a book as an example, it really should compile and execute without modification. Otherwise, you should indicate that it doesn't execute unless you first do steps x, y, and z. 3. Chapter 5, on Views covers in good depth how to use the JSP pages as data gathering mechanisms (subheading "JSPs that Gather Data"), but doesn't cover AT ALL how to present that data. I guess he assumes we all know how to present it! In chapter 11, he covers how to use the <html:iterate/> custom tag to iterate over the result sets obtained from a database query, but there is no real detail in the book about it. I would imagine that 98% of us will be using this mechanism HEAVILY, and felt like it deserved a better treatment within chapter 5. 4. He didn't cover ANY of the M of MVC. He lumped all his JDBC code into his Action classes, which doesn't seem like good design to me. Also, it seemed like he made an assumption that Model = Database. This isn't exactly the case.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good solid Struts Tutorial, August 29, 2003
This review is from: Mastering Jakarta Struts (Paperback)
I feel this is the best book for novice Struts developers eventhough it is not as up to date as some of the others. This book does a good coverage of extending Struts, and a really good coverage of the inner workings of Struts. I have all of the Struts books (Sams, KF, Orielly, Manning, and Wiley) etc. This is the first book out of the lot that I could just read (cover to cover). It has good flow, and it is easy to understand. (I read it quite a while back when it first came out). Areas of weakness is in Tiles framework support and the Validator framework, but currently no Struts book covers Tiles well. Struts in Action does a really good coverage of the Validator book as does the Orielly book. First get this book as a good tutorial.
Second get the Struts in Action book as a good reference.
Then get the Orielly Struts book (in this order in my opinion). If you are doing Struts, it can't hurt to have Sue Speilmans book (who covers nested tags well), and the Sams Struts book. I have all of the books. This is the best tutorial for getting started.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great Struts book, September 20, 2002
This review is from: Mastering Jakarta Struts (Paperback)
I liked this book and learned a lot from it. It is now the top book on the stack of books on my desk. One of the things I like is that this book is a great reference. I consult it frequently for explanations of Struts tags, especially because the author included code samples that show how each tag is used in combination with other tags. I use the bean, logic, and template tag library references pretty regularly. The error handling info is great. The info on validating data in your forms is good. The deployment advice is excellent. I also
really like the debugging chapter and found it incredibly useful since Struts isn't the absolute most stable framework I've ever
used. One reviewer said he didn't like the embedded Tomcat example in the debugging chapter, but I learned a lot from
debugging a real app and can apply the concepts pretty easily to my own work. I read through the internationalization section of this book and am now pretty hyped about putting that functionality in some of
my Struts apps, even if my company doesn't really think its necesary yet. :| I also like that this book shows you how to build a complete Struts applications. You can see clearly how Struts works with
servlets, jsp, and other serverside technologies. I even learned a few things from the summary of servlets and jsp in the second
chapter. All around a very useful book!
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