23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointment, January 7, 2003
I've relied on O'Reilly books to provide the gist for any number of topics but this one disappoints on a number of levels. Too much filler material (if you don't know about EJBs and WARs then you shouldn't be reading this book) and an imbalance of detail. I need to know how to enable debugging in struts-config.xml or how to specify the message properties files in web.xml, not individual attributes to custom tags; I can find those in the javadocs.
Granted it's a relatively new technology but this treatise didn't provide much more than what I could find on-line. There wasn't even decent coverage of the specifics of minLength and other validator features. Trash the fluff and stick to the details which implementors require and you might have a decent book.
Now I'll just have to buy the Husted tome. It's not like I'm made of money, you know? I just can't recommend this book to someone trying to develop a production application in "web time".
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Serious Review about Programming Jakarta Struts, January 8, 2003
By A Customer
I've wanted to write a review for this book ever since I started reading the draft chapters on theserverside.com. I was one of the many who participated in submitting feedback from the very beginning and feel like I've learned so much from the material, but understand how someone might not get it immediately.
This book was written specifically to teach Struts developers how to fish; it wasn't designed to fish for us. This is something the Author mentioned on the list many times. You won't find a million different ways to use a specific tag for example. Instead, I think the coverage is more advanced and attempts to strive higher than just Struts.
So, here's my review for this book. I hope it helps you decide whether this book is for you or not.
First the bad - This book is light on the tags section. If you are looking for every which way to use the iterate tag for example, you won't find it here. Also, the modules coverage could have been better. Of course, I think that's due to the flux that modules was in at the time of release. I don't personally hold this against the Author. The other books (especially the ones that came out before it) have the same issue.
The other topic I would have liked to see covered in the book is Security. It's actually not covered in any of the books very well. Based on the earlier table of contents that the Author published, it was included. However it was posted on the mailing list that the chapter on security was being cut due to size and time. Maybe the 2nd edition will add this (hint, hint).
Now the Good - This book covers so much about how to hook Struts up to a Model architecture; especially Chapter 13 (the one on EJB). I really like this chapter and have learned so much from it. The examples are clear, concise and helpful.
The coverage of exception handling is superb! As is the coverage of logging (using log4j), tiles and the validator framework. The packaging chapter was very beneficial as was the chapter on I18N. However, what I liked about this book the most and what I think is the most valuable is the following:
The Author clearly has built Struts applications for real companies and it's obvious to me (at least) that he's sincerely trying to communicate what's important for the big picture.
So my advice to you if you are considering buying this book is, if you want to see how the tags can be used in every situation, buy another book. Actually you'll probably have to just read the user guide because I don't think the other books cover this any more. On the other hand, if you want to learn the 1.1 features in depth and learn big picture ideas and concepts, then I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It's possible that you won't appreciate all the material in the beginning, but after you work with Struts for 6 months, you most certainly will.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Agreed... not as good for beginners, April 23, 2004
This book does an excellent job of laying out the Struts framework at a high level and then explaining each individual component of the framework in detail. It provides clear examples of good design patterns separating the business model from the view/controller of the application, and decent documentation of the use of each parameter in the configuration files.
What it does not do is provide easy, step by step, "this is what we just did and this is the result"-style tutorials on building your first Struts application.
I read most of the book without attempting to sit down and write any code. When I finished reading, I had a clear understanding of how the framework operated and a good idea about how I wanted to build my first Struts application. However, when I sat down to actually code the application using the book as a reference, I was completely lost.
I must say that I am disappointed because the book does seem to market itself to all levels of Struts developers, but I think it's really only useful to somebody who has already gone through a few tutorials. I learned more about building my first Struts application by following tutorials in the MyEclipse IDE, and reading the code and configuration files from existing Struts applications.
I give this book 1 star for beginners and 5 for experienced developers - so let's call it a 3.
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