Customer Reviews

Struts in Action: Building Web Applications with the Leading Java Framework

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Struts in Action is a good book that has some flaws. I had this book pre-ordered on Amazon from the minute I heard about its publication. The lead author Ted Husted is very active in the Struts development community and still manages a great Struts resource site.

I read the book right away and spent a few weeks going over all the examples in the book. My overall feeling is that this is a good book but it suffers from a lot of the same thing that affects other Struts book. These books were published right around the release of Struts 1.1 and so they are on the fence where they talk about Struts 1.0 and 1.1. Since I had used Struts 1.0 before, the sections that described the changes from 1.0 to 1.1 was very helpful.

Like other books, there is some mention of JSTL but not any details. The section on tag libraries is extensive and well written.

I just went through all my Struts books again as I had to teach a 6 week class on Struts. I went through the five Struts books I owned and I settled on 'Programming Jakarta Struts' by Chuck Cavaness as my finalist. Struts in Action is really a good book but I felt the Chuck Cavaness did a better job of acting as a tutorial. So if you only want to buy one Struts book, I would recommend the Chuck Cavaness book. However, if you want more than one, I would highly recommend this book as your second book on Struts.

I purchased Struts in Action because the web contains horribly incomplete and obtuse information about struts. I have to search through three or more sites to find what I'm looking for, and then test and wonder if I got it right.

After reading the reviews I thought this book thinking would be right on the mark, and after reading the first couple of chapters I was going to write a glowing review but....

So close. It's a great book with 1/3 of the information missing. The big picture is here, it's just not explained fully, or pieces are left out. Struts in Action starts beautifully, explaining the struts-config files, the details behind the struts-basic app, and an excellent later chapter about struts-tiles. This book just falls flat extending and scaling this knowledge in any depth. I was hoping for DETAILS about the struts taglibs, and I was let down by how it glosses over even some of the less granular points, such as what are the important and more oft-used attributes for each tag, and multiple examples of these tags in use (i.e how does the html:text tag use labels? How do I set a static checkbox to selected? Why was the html:form tag left out of the appendix?). It seems that the author just assumes that once you know the basics and go over the code, you can do anything. Well, that's why I was reading this book, because I expected it to be full of examples and code. He does such a fabulous job with the config file, and then loses focus.

Still, out of the current Struts books, Ted's is BY FAR the most detailed, authoritative, and useful, and for these reasons worthy of an extra star.

I'd still recommend this book, but unfortunately it's only as complete as the typically incomplete information on the Jakarta site. If you know nothing about struts, this will get you going. If you already know something but want to extend your knowledge in breadth and depth past the struts-config, you may be let down.

That's what I love the most about this book, it doesn't just talk about how to configure and develop with Struts. It's a web application manifesto. Anyone can write a book about how to use Struts to build a web application. That's not the point. This book is ~8 people-years worth of first-hend developer knowledge (4 authors x ~2 years of working on the Struts project) condensed down into 630 pages. It doesn't just teach you how to use Struts (and Velocity and Taglibs and Tiles), but why you should use them. That's the most important thing this book has to offer. If your project is looking at using Struts & other Jakarta technologies, you need this book. If your project is currently using Struts & other Jakarta technologies, you need this book

The book abounds with incorrect examples. Since the book puports to guide the user to a greater understanding of Struts through the liberal use of examples, the books lack of accuracy is unforgivable. Spending time attempting to work through examples which simply do not work is rather frustrating. One of the selling points of the book is the use of the "free" private website where users can interact with the author who is allegedly a "Struts expert". Contrary the the books pronoucement, I've noticed that most messages go unanswered. In a few rare cases, the author actually answers a question. Mostly he simply instructs users to subscribe to the Struts mailing list. I would like to remind both the publisher and author(s) of section xxxii in the chapter entitled "About This Book" where it is stated, and I quote "Purchase of Struts In Action includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the lead author and from other users."

Overall this is a pretty good book for someone who slightly worked on Struts. I enjoy the first couple of chapters where it gives a very good overview of Struts and various configuration files. However, as you start to go deeper into the book, it starts to lack good examples and was throwing too much detailed information at you all at once. I don't see a lot of people able to remember all these details after reading the book and apply them to their day to day works. I am ok with it since I am already somewhat familar with Struts. But I can't imagine someone new to Struts to be able to read this book and understand the materials the book presents. So unless you have worked on Struts for several months or been looking at Struts code for a while, you might want to read a beginner book first and come back to this to acquire more advance information.

I am not sure if the most recent reviewers read the same book that I read. Struts in Action provides the gamut of simple to detailed information about the Struts framework. Additionally, the goal of the book is not to provide complete examples but to use pieces of code to actually show examples of the information that Mr. Husted is conveying. There comes a point where being spoon fed is something different than learning.

For those who need a complete application for an example might I suggest "Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Object Relational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity". That book builds a complete web app as its premise. Again, the goal in Struts in Action is to provide the details of how to approach the MVC way of doing things using Jakarta Struts. The use of additional toolsets like Scaffold comes from the experience of the author (as evidenced by stuff in the Struts mailing lists and Resources page).

I keep going back to this book over all the other Struts books simply because it provides information and examples of details that I am trying to figure out while building apps. As with all things in the open source world things change and fluidity is a beautiful thing. To refute one reviewer in particular I must point out that when this book was published Hibernate was not industrial strength code. I am using Hibernate now on some apps but don't blame Ted for not giving every solution to every problem...

I've used this book for the last 6 months on my 1st Struts project, and am using it for my 2nd. I've now read it three times. It gets clearer every time, but should I have to read it three times before it makes sense? This can't be your only Struts book. You'll need other references.

My biggest complaint is that the examples in the beginning of the book constantly use Struts tag libraries instead of plain HTML that a non-Struts programmer already knows. The problem is that the book doesn't get around to explaining the tag syntax until chapter 10, so I had an awful time trying to understand what the early examples were doing. Hence the necessity to read it multiple times. It didn't help that there are many, many errors in the examples. (If you get this book, go get the errata and pencil them in BEFORE you read it. That will save a lot of head-scratching.)

I also think the authors tried to cover too many subjects outside of Struts, such as Tiles and Scaffolds. For a programmer buying this book to learn about Struts, these additional frameworks just add layers of confusion. They would have done much better to stick with pure Struts and Java and leave these Struts "add-ons" to another book.

Finally, this book, like almost every programing book on the market, suffers from a lack of drawings. Sometimes a simple drawing showing process or data flow, or even a screen shot of what a rendered jsp page looks like, will save pages of verbage.

On a positive note, I really liked the first half of the book where different aproaches were presented along with the pro/con of each. Also, the writing is fairly "friendly", sentances are kept short and to the point and the layout is easy to read.

Though the book does cover the basics, it failed to be clear and concreate, when it gets into details. There is a huge gap between the "Simple Application" of Ch.3 and the "Artimus Application" of Ch. 15. And these are the only two examples in the entire book. Infact to add more to the confusion, the authors started referring to "Artimus" in bit and pieces in the earlier chapters themselves. While the reader doesn't have any idea at all.

There is no simple example, which explains the use of a Database. Rather the authors resorted to the so called "Commercial-grade application, The Artimus". Well it may be of commercial-grade, but doesn't help the developer to start quick.

And best of all, it uses Scaffold tool set, which you can find, no where else other than the authors' website. In the Jakarta site, it is yet to be released and right now in "Sandbox (Not-Yet-Proposed) Components " category. God knows what the authors' had in mind. Looks like they wanted to emphasise more on there own tool sets (like scaffold) than struts actually. Rather it would have been much better, if they have used quite matured DAO like Hibernate, etc.

Hope they come out with better examples with more clear explanations in the next edition of the book.

When I needed to learn Struts, I went first to the online doc, but found it wanting. I then went to the O'Reilly book on the subject, assuming it would be as good as other O'reilly material, but it just wasn't. I did my due diligence and picked Ted Husted's Struts in Action, and I haven't regretted it at all. It covers what needs to be covered, in a methodical logical fashion. Sadly, this is more than I can say for most tech books, not just the ones on Struts. Virtually every Struts book I looked at covered some things I didn't want to know about and left out stuff about things critical to me. Struts in Action was a valuable learning tool and continues to serve as a great reference.

After reading the O'Reilly Jakarta Struts book I started reading this one. I have about one year of Struts experience so I am not quite starting. The difference between the two books is striking. This book gives you all the nuts and bolds and puts the whole Struts framework in the conceptual context it deserves. O'Reilly's book is a good book for starters but does not really leave the surface. So it is good to start out with but you really should move to this book to get the work done!