Customer Reviews

Professional JSP 2nd Edition

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wrox Press continues their time-honored tradional of piling as many authors into one 1200 page volume that they can in the hopes that they will end up with a definitive treatment of the subject. The authors range from seasoned professionals with real-world experience to pimple-faced hacks with nothing but a year or two of college computer science courses behind them. .... I must confess that I am not sure what I was expecting in these chapters but since JSP Tag Libraries seemed to be one of the more challenging and interesting areas of JSPs I was hoping for some more meaningful, 'meaty' content.

The assembly of these 18 (yes, 18!) authors wind up generating a book that essentially could have been put together with more precision and continuity if it had 15 fewer authors. It very much comes off as a rushed effort, without any tightness whatsoever. The writing style of this second edition can only be described as amateurish. This, fortunately, can be a little easier to swallow if you accept the spirit of the book (in Wrox's words 'Programmer to Programmer'). Take the text as quickly put-together material from programmers that have been through it (even if it was brief or only in school) and you should be fine.

Many unnecessary forward references exist throughout the text and, because of the unusually large number of authors, there is a large amount of repetition in the body of most chapters. The book's page count could also have been greatly reduced had the authors not consistently given condensed introduction to material that ends up being the subject matter for entire chapters later in the book. For example, two early chapters describe the basics of Tag Libraries, only to have them surface as the primary topic of chapters 8 - 11.

The code included throughout the book is variable in quality, as you might expect. The book doesn't pretend to be an academic tome of best practices or a showcase for some top-flight, brilliant programming but you end up thinking that many of the examples could have been made much more effective with more thought put into them. As with many other programming books out there, this one is definitely not without its errors. You'd hope, however, that with the 21 technical reviewers and 3 editors that worked on this book that it would have fared better than most.

In summary, if you take the text for what it is and skip over the segments of fluff and numerous poor code examples I think that most professional programmers new to this technology will find enough material to make the hefty price tag almost worth it (especially if you share it with others on your team!). ....

Well, i bought this book with one aim: Be able to learn and actually write JSP in limited terms. Since I found a job where they wanted me to do JSP, and I was doing ASP for last 2 years. This book has even section for ASP developers on how to move to JSP. So, with this book, I was able to write jsp in a week or so. ok, Now, actually about the book:

a) Great code explanation provided, as usual in any WROX books

b) Great code examples (especially voting application and database explorer one)

c) Tomcat and MySQL tutorial make my life easier, so i don't have to browse their sites for help - I have everything in one place (well, not everything -- but still, better then nothing)

d) Yes, price is kind of high, but, they got so much in one book, so i'm pretty sure that you will be glad once you buy it

I'd recommend this book for people who have to move from ASP (or any other programming language) to JSP. I would not recommend it to someone who is new to programming.

Thanks for all authors. Great Job.

Wrox Press continues their time-honored tradional of piling as many authors into one 1200 page volume that they can in the hopes that they will end up with a definitive treatment of the subject. The authors range from seasoned professionals with real-world experience to people with nothing but a year or two of college computer science courses behind them. I must confess that I am not sure what I was expecting in these chapters but since JSP Tag Libraries seemed to be one of the more challenging and interesting areas of JSPs I was hoping for some more meaningful, 'meaty' content.

The assembly of these 18 (yes, 18!) authors wind up generating a book that essentially could have been put together with more precision and continuity if it had 15 fewer authors. It very much comes off as a rushed effort, without any tightness whatsoever. The writing style of this second edition can only be described as amateurish. This, fortunately, can be a little easier to swallow if you accept the spirit of the book (in Wrox's words 'Programmer to Programmer'). Take the text as quickly put-together material from programmers that have been through it (even if it was brief or only in school) and you should be fine.

Many unnecessary forward references exist throughout the text and, because of the unusually large number of authors, there is a large amount of repetition in the body of most chapters. The book's page count could also have been greatly reduced had the authors not consistently given condensed introduction to material that ends up being the subject matter for entire chapters later in the book. For example, two early chapters describe the basics of Tag Libraries, only to have them surface as the primary topic of chapters 8 - 11.

The code included throughout the book is variable in quality, as you might expect. The book doesn't pretend to be an academic tome of best practices or a showcase for some top-flight, brilliant programming but you end up thinking that many of the examples could have been made much more effective with more thought put into them. As with many other programming books out there, this one is definitely not without its errors. You'd hope, however, that with the 21 technical reviewers and 3 editors that worked on this book that it would have fared better than most.

In summary, if you take the text for what it is and skip over the segments of fluff and numerous poor code examples I think that most professional programmers new to this technology will find enough material to make the hefty price tag almost worth it (especially if you share it with others on your team!).

When I needed to learn JSP (I got a job to build some serious custom tag libraries) my first stop was the Core series. I liked the Core Java 2 books. At first I liked the Core JSP books too, they are quick to read and easy to understand.

But then after some weeks working on real projects I noticed that they lacked very much essential information. I found myself searching through the office copy of Professional JSP 1st edition again and again to get the job done.

This 2nd edition is even better. If you are a decent programmer (not a complete beginner who's better of with some dummies books) and want to get the job done - this is the choice. The book relies heavily on examples. Several case studies with all the code implemented.

This book goes way beyond a standard discussion of basic web application development with JSP, covering some great topics like XML, XSL, WAP, Struts, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed this breadth, and have added some great new "tools" to my repetoire as a result.

HOWEVER, I've found a number of annoying syntax errors in the examples that have cost me many frustrating minutes debugging (especially in the Custom tag section). If the authors would have only tested their own examples, I think this would be an excellent book.

Finally, you don't really get any consistency throughout this book, either stylistically or otherwise....but I guess you should expect that when you have 20-some authors writing 1 book.

Explains one aproach then rejects it in favor of another then yet another. By the end you discover that you should have bought a book on Jakarta Struts if you want to develop real JSP sites because someone has already done lots of work for you.

i am considering buying the second edition. Have never seen a computer book change so much in the 2nd edition, new stuff.

This would not be your first JSP book, as that guy from Bern wanted. His clue should have been the word "Professional". I found Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages by Marty Hall to be an excellent starter if that is your level. Then buy this book.

frank

I am not an expert web programmer. I am a competent programmer. I hate big thick books because you never read them all. But I have to break my no-thick-books rule for this book. It is a great reference work. You can read the first few chapters and then jump to the advanced chapter you need. I had a working JSP program written in 3 days. I never read the whole book but I did read a good 30% of it. One warning. This book is not for beginers. It is not JSP for dummies.

Although the level of this book is fairly advanced, it is very thorough in the topics it covers. Some reviewers seem to think it should be a little more basic, but maybe they should have read the introduction. It reads:

"This book is aimed at anyone who knows the Java language and core APIs..."

If this describes you, and you want a very in-depth coverage of this technology, you'll love this book.

Since this is the work of several authors, there is a lot of overlap of content in the various chapters.

It is evident from the chapters that some of the authors are new to JSP1.2 technology and some of them to Java itself, and they managed to get their work (in-progress) in this book!!! (Plus, got customers like me buy this book for a cool sum.)

As an exception to every rule, some of the chapters in this book are good, especially the discussion on MVC and Filters.