Customer Reviews

Servlets and JavaServer Pages™: The J2EE™ Technology Web Tier

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

 

 

Unlike the previous reviewer, I have found this book to be an excellent introduction to and tutorial on the J2EE presentation tier. Although most of my career I have been developing the server side (C++, Java), in tha past I developed rich (using Java Swing) or thin (using Microsoft's Active Server Pages) clients. In other words, major concepts and patterns of client development are not new to me. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed reading this book.

Specifically I like this book for the balanced and professional style in which the authors' present its material: they focus not only on the technological aspects of JSP and Servlets, but dedicate considerable amount of material to instill best practices and design patterns. They dedicated an entire chapter to the design patterns, in addition to explaining the best practices (dos and don'ts) in other chapters throughout the book. This should be especially beneficial to novices: unfortunately too many of them learn *only* technological aspects of programming; working on their own, without the guidance of experienced leads or designers, they crank out absolutely horrible and un-maintainable code that becomes a liability to both their employer and customers. The chapters on security, patterns, multi-client support, and ways to manage the web application state all explain and reinforce designs that produce robust and manageable systems that can evolve.

This is by far the best book I have ever read about servlets and jsps. I have several books on the subject, and this is the first one that explains the subject matter in a logical, understandable way. The authors do an excellent job of covering all the material needed to understand and use the material in real world development.
The book is organized in a logical and well thought out manner. Each chapter builds on the chapters that precede it, and the last chapter, Building a Complete Web Application, is the best idea I've seen in a long time, integrating information from all the preceding chapters into a project that is practical and usable in the real world with some minor modifications.
The code examples are functional, and the ones that do contain errors, which are not many, are well documented in the errata portion of the book's supporting website, which is a good resource for the book.

Without a doubt the best book on the subject I have.

If you are a Java developer (which I am) and want to develop Web Applications and learn Servlets and JSP, you can't go wrong with this book. In fact, in my opinion, this is one of the best Java books on any subject that you can buy. Much has been written on the subjects of servlets and JSP, but it is rare that the key concepts for truly understanding these subjects are put in sufficient context to grasp the big picture of developing full featured web applications. What separates this book from the rest is the well structured way each concept is clearly presented and put into the larger context to explain the relevance of the concept to the larger picture of developing web applications.

In particular, for each concept, the reader is led through a typical developer path of first getting the technology to operate, and then shown how initial quick and dirty development patterns are improved by more sophisticated design patterns. Patterns for error handling, filters, security, internationalization, and especially the user presentation model view controller (MVC) pattern are clearly explained, and their use in web application development is demonstrated.

The issues of where to place functionality: in servlets, filters, tags, JSPs, scriplets, EJB(!), etc. are brought out in such a way that the reader can learn the relevance of each technology that has emerged in the Java web application development universe, which has been characterizedby fast evolving releases of approaches to dealing with the integration of Java and HTML/XML components. It is demonstrated that these technologies have finally converged to a set of tools that can enable the Java developer to have full command of web application development. In summary, I highly recommend this book and believe it is a milestone, in that it shows that Java has now evolved into a truly powerful web application development platform.

Overall, it is good book to read.

The begining chapters are good for beginners, especially for people to use TomCat.

The later chapters are advanced but not detailed enough for reference. They explain concepts. But they are advanced so not many readers care about it and they may think these pages are waste.

The samples are very good to run without issue when you check logs in this book's website.

One thing I don't like is it uses pages to explain Servlet which is not very popular in the world now.

I have been working on all tiers of web applications. I think the reviewers gave low score to this book are really new comer to the Java world.

I rate it 5 stars just because Ken Januski underrated it. Do not believe Januski. I can suppose he simply dous not know what he is talking about. This is far not the "worst book", this book is good and it actual rating must be 4 stars.

The only one lack is that it is not suitable as your first book on the topic. Servlets are explained on only 70 pages, there are not many examples there, so you need some knowledge to read this book.

But anyway, its worth buying.

I bought this book and I thought it was a good resource to start developing JSP based Servlet based web applications.
I would recommend this book as a starter for anyone making the initial transition to Java Web Development. There are many books on the shelf, not as many as in years before, and in truth most of them are not worth the paper they are written on. But these books are normally published by the same company. Addison Wesley usually publishes good quality material.
Good book for the right audience.

I have to admit that I haven't finished this book, but I may never accomplish that and retain any hair on my head. Each page requires me to pull a little more hair out of my head in frustration. If you want to get a sampling of the prose "just consider that as I read each and every page I attain a level of frustration at the wasted and unclear words that dominate the very page I am reading and make me almost feel that the authors may in fact just be using needless words to bulk up the book rather than to make the book readable or useful and because of that I want to pull my hair out." Yes that's the way the book is written. About this time the authors will tell you that they've covered all the information that they wanted to in this paragraph and are now moving on to the next one.

I have to agree with the reviewer who suggested saving your time and money on another book. This is by far the worst book I've ever read on jsp and servlets and it makes me very angry that I didn't spend my money elsewhere.

I particularly take to task the editors of Addison-Wesley who have put out some of the best computer programming books I've read. Did they send all their copy editors on vacation as this book came out? There's not the slightest hint of copy editing.

Beyond my complaints about the prose the content isn't much either. Compared to the O'Reilly jsp and servlet books or the Marty Hall books, or the SCWCD certifications books from Manning and Wrox this books is truly horrible and not very useful. All of them cover these technologies better and with prose that actually is enjoyable reading.

All in all I have to say that Addison-Wesley ought to be embarrassed by this one.

The book covers every important aspect of servlet and jsp technologies with nice samples.I do totally recommend this for everyone willing to learn servlet/jsp.

I came across this book after reading articles written by the authors on sites devoted to Java development.

The short articles written by the authors were insightful and thorough.

My expectations for the book were high but the end results are far below the standards I was expecting. It appears that the authors (or editors) were lost as to the focus of the book. The writing style is tedious to follow. The order of the book is haphazard.

The book starts off at getting a Hello World application up and running - for Servlets. The following chapter is a similar introduction to JSP.

The authors seem preoccupied with Internalization - this appears all over the book.

Subsequent chapters cover exception handling, security, JSP tags etc.

You may find nuggets of useful references in this book - sparsely located but they do exist. Hence the two stars - but it still does not justify the sticker price.

I came across this book after reading articles written by the authors on sites devoted to Java development.

The short articles written by the authors were insightful and thorough.

My expectations for the book were high but the end results were far below the standards I was expecting. It appears that the authors (or editors) were lost as to the focus of the book. The writing style is tedious to follow. The order of the book is haphazard.

The book starts off at getting a Hello World application up and running - for Servlets. The following chapter is a similar introduction to JSP.

The authors seem preoccupied with Internalization - this appears all over the book.

Subsequent chapters cover exception handling, security, JSP tags etc.

You may find nuggets of useful references in this book - sparsely located but they do exist. Hence the two stars - but it still does not justify the sticker price.