Customer Reviews

Stripes: ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again (Pragmatic Programmers)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

That's pretty strong praise, I know, but well deserved. For the last 10 years I have attempted to keep my skill set sharp by reading and playing with new languages, frameworks, and concepts. Everyone knows the most frustrating part of most technical books is that the code samples never work. Or the author makes assumptions about your level of knowledge on something peripheral yet essential to getting the code to run.
Not so with this book.
This book will take you through all the basics to get this framework up and running in less than 10 minutes. I was amazed the first time a colleague showed me Stripes. I had never heard of it. With Stripes we were able to get a full blown web application up running using EJB 3.0 for persistence, Guice for injecting beans, and Stripes tags for the view in minutes. Naturally, I chalked this up to my colleague's expertise - the guy is scary smart. So when I changed jobs and was asked about frameworks I liked, I said Stripes.
Although the documentation on the Stripes site may be OK for gurus like my former colleague, I found myself struggling to repeat our success with Stripes by myself until I bought this book. The examples are clear, the writing enjoyable to read, and the code just flat out works.
There were some minor things that did not work as I expected them to, when I expected them to, but usually this was due to my own error. Sometimes I found I had missed something in the reading or simply gotten ahead of the author.
When I did have questions about why things weren't working quite right or why something was done a certain way, I simply posted a note on the Stripes mailing list and I was answered directly by the author himself. As I am writing this, Mr. Daoud is actually going over my configuration to see what I messed up when trying to get the Stripes MockServletContext to run properly.
In fact, I have had Tim Fennell and Frederic Daoud respond directly to questions via email in less than 2 hours the few times I have had questions on anything Stripes related. It was also nice to see that one of the questions I posted on the mailing list regarding client side validation and passing the event name via JavaScript was actually addressed in the book on page 345.
If I sound excited about the book, it's because I am. The Stripes framework, the Stripes community, Tim Fennell, and Frederic Daoud are all fantastic. But now that I have this book, I have a Stripes expert with me all the time.

I received this book few days before Christmas, and I'm now really impressed: in few weeks, following this beautiful manual, I got all the necessary information and skills I need to start using the Stripes Framework for my own projects!
I successfully implemented also the Stripersist library and Hibernate, and everything is working fine from the beginning.
Stripes is a recent tool, but we are lucky because the official website is rich of useful information and the documentation is very accurate; we are lucky because Stripes is very powerful but also extremely simple, and Frederic Daoud did a fantastic work writing this book!
It's very well organized, introducing components and arguments of the framework in a logic and developer-friendly way.
Chapters on Layout Reuse, Custom Messages and Persistance are absolutely stunning, definitively one of the best tecnical book I have read in the last year!
On the Pragmatic Programmer's web site you can find the zipped source code with all the book's examples: it's useful to keep everything under control, looking at the entire class code, following the changes introduced in the book.

I just finished this book and I have to say that it is one of the best written programming books I've ever read. The thing that wasn't so clear to me before I bought the book was how comprehensive it was--after having read it, it is by far, one of the most comprehensive, end-to-end books I've ever read.

I've been involved w/ web application development for over a decade, and no other framework has piqued my interest like Stripes. In addition to being "new" and not carrying over the baggage other frameworks have from prior versions, Stripes is a refreshing change.

In addition, the Stripes user community is just absolutely fantastic! Post a question to the mail list, and you'll have an answer back quicker than you'd expect--and the depth of knowledge of those on the list is both wonderful and amazing.

This wonderful framework combined with a great user community and now this excellent book makes Stripes worth learning, and Daoud's book is a bible to learning everything from the fundamentals and basics to advanced topics. I can't praise it enough! VERY well written!

I purchased the pre-release of this book, and was delighted when my book finally arrived. This book covers stripes end to end and various integration points between stripes and other important enterprise frameworks such as hibernate/JPA and Spring. It explains a beautifully simple framework thoroughly and carefully pointing out other tools that work well with the stripes core such as stripersist and stripes-security. This book is concentrated knowledge laid out clearly and concisely. If you want to do web development in Java, and you don't need a heavily component based framework, stripes is for you, and this book is great for stripes. The examples and topics are clearer and cleaner than what is given on the stripes website and has with it resources that can help you get a complex website up and running in a very short amount of time. I have rarely read a book that was this easy to understand and follow, and it has become my reference bible for stripes since beginning with the framework. I only wish the other frameworks I've worked with had such good documentation.

A few months ago we migrated from a home-grown framework to the Stripes framework. We were only using a small subset of what you can accomplish with Stripes, and thanks to this book we now know how to use Stripes to it's full potential. The book is easy to read and the examples are great! It walks you through building an entire web application from beginning to end.

This book lives up to it's title, with Stripes and help of this book, Java web development is fun again!

At 380 pages this is the thinnest technical book in my book shelve but yet it covers everything I need to know to develop a web application - from "Hello World" to ajax, security, cross sites scripting attack, unit testing ...

I was pleasantly surprised by how comprehensive this book is. I learned a great deal from this book. I am especially appreciative of the section on security. I learned a great deal seeing how the many well though out features of Stripes being put together to produce a secured wed application. This section alone is worth the price of the book.

A superb framework and an equally superb book. Stripes is my favorite web framework, and this is one of the few technical book that I enjoyed reading and owning.

This book is very well written and as of right now is the Holy Grail on Stripes development. Stripes is a very simple elegant modern MVC action based web application framework for Java and this book tells you everything you need to know to not only get up to speed with Stripes but also best practices and common patterns to use throughout your application development life cycle.

Freddy does a superb job of writing technically but without the overtones of superiority as some authors tend to project. The book is easy to read and allows the reader to move from chapter to chapter in a very concise and cognitive manner.

If you are new to Stripes get this book. If you are familiar with Stripes, get this book. I promise you will learn something you didn't know before, just as I did.

As others have mentioned this is one of the best written books on programming/frameworks that I have read bar maybe Agile Web Development on Rails. I am a relative Java newbie and this has book has successfully got me up and running on 2 new projects using stripes. I will continue to use stripes and this book as reference for time to come. Thanks Freddy for your belief in this framework and your efforts to make its ease of use well known.

This book is a must for anyone using Stripes, novice or pro. The author has done a great job of explaining the basics as well as the details of Stripes' amazing features while showing how to build a real-life application. A novice developer can get up to speed fast, keeping with Stripes' pragmatic approach to development: "It doesn't have to be hard." As the chapters progress, you will gain thorough knowledge of all the Stripes features. What really impressed me was the author's dedication to giving you full examples of all the possible variations; you're not left thinking, "If I just knew how to use that feature." If you want to know how to use a Stripes feature, look it up in this book--it's definitely covered. Stripes...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again will be on my work desk from now on.

Jeppe Cramon
Chief Architect, TigerTeam

This is the best book on Stripes you could possibly find. I read it cover to cover, it's easy to follow and understand. The author has an easy way for explaining complicated topics. I was able to build a search engine in two days, just by reading the very first chapters. You could finish the book in a week and start building your web application right way. I highly recommend it.