Customer Reviews

Pro Apache Tomcat 6

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

 

 

I have read this book cover to cover. It contains plenty of useful technical info, I learned a lot, and so I give it 3 stars. Boy, was it tedious reading though! The grammar is broken in many places. The style is rather stiff and tiresome. I do not blame the author though, and I wish the editors and reviewers did better job prior to bringing this work to the public. Yeah, even hackers and software geeks appreciate good writing! In fact, it is quite evident that Chapter 14 "Testing Tomcat's Performance" was written by a different writer than the rest of the book. A breath of fresh air! This chapter reads well, it flows, no grammar problems, no stiff/awkward/stilted style. Nice job on this one. Anyway, the author worked hard. Writing is a tough job, and it is not easy to organize, present and teach technical subjects, I know. But it seems to me that the quality control at Apress is sorely lacking. They might be rushing things to production a little too fast, so it seems. Hope they improve though!

I read this book from cover to cover because I am a tomcat administrator and I need to update from version 5 upto 6. What I got after reading the book is very little.

Most of the technical explanations are very shallow, some address -badly- esoteric/complex issues. The contents within each chapter do not mix well, there is no logic flow when reading the book from chapter to chapter.

The book lacks working examples, the chapter 14 is completely useless, how can you test the tomcat if you can not set up it properly ?

The appendix on MySql is unnecesary, that's not the main bulk of the work for Tomcat administrators.

The book seems to be a rush rewriting from a previous book based on Tomcat 5.5.

I will give a try to: The Professional Apache Tomcat 6 by Vivek Chopra, Sing Li, Jeff Genender. I hope this time I won't miss the point.

I'd wish there would be a way to measurably gauge how far, "for better or worse", books have strayed away from the carelessly lousy online documentation from a purely linguistic point of view.

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This book has almost no actual examples of anything real in its 300 pages. It just the online docs with some Windows specific stuff thrown in, some of it relatively interesting/esoteric like using IIS front ending TC and some other stuff, which to me does not merit space in a TC book, e.g., Securing file system on a OS level, in which the author states (page 219) "Windows gives you much more flexibility when assigning permissions than Unix does" I am still wondering when, if ever, Windows will be able to achieve the level of security that hardened gentoo sports right from a live CD

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Matthew Moodie's book, in addition to the very Windows-centric mindset, also contains quite a bit of bluff and insipid content, sections that appear to have no meat whatsoever like "Transactions and Distributed Transactions Support". I wonder why didn't they just leave this section altogether. It also has many little mistakes that at some point I simply started underlining with my comments next to them:

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page 4: "Tomcat is always the first server to provide the new features of the spex when it is finished" Actually not true, Jetty has been better at that that TC itself

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page 59: author refers to the "commons" branch in TC directory structure while talking about logging listing 4-7 (TC 6 did away with it)

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page 161: "Using Tomcat's connectors"/"The Workers" it should be "CATALINA_BASE1", "CATALINA_BASE2", ...

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Book also seems to be talking more about TC 5.5 than the new features of TC 6.0

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Pro Apache Tomcat 6 by Matthew Moodie (edited by Kunal Mittal and published by Apress)

is an interesting book for anyone who wants to know more about this popular open source servlet container.

It explains Tomcat's configuration and administration; it covers the areas encountered more often in an enterprise environment.

Among the subjects presented are: Tomcat's installation, configuration files, web application administration, the usage of valves, the configuration of user sessions, clustering, class loading issues,

connectors configuration (SSL, integration with apache http server and IIS), load balancing, JDBC data sources,

user authentication, Tomcat's security and the implementation of shared hosting.

The last chapter presents useful information about performance testing with Apache JMeter.

Pros: This book contains plenty of useful technical information. I liked the chapters about class loaders and connectors.

Cons: The style used is too formal and tedious.

I wish there were more real life working examples.

I would have liked more explanations on clustering, load balancing, the architecture and the inner workings

of a servlet container and not just an enumeration of some configuration options.