Customer Reviews

Struts Design and Programming: A Tutorial (A Tutorial series)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Part 1 of this book discusses Struts programming. It covers the current version of Struts (1.2). The second part is what's really great. It teaches you how to design Struts application properly. Some related design patterns are discussed that made you glad you'd chosen this book. For example, there are a number of chapters that are as useful and high quality as this article (from the same author)

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/05/decorators.html

Other design topics include
- Paging
- Managing very large resultsets in multi pages
- Transfer data object design pattern
- Data Access Object
- Caching
- Persistence layer
- etc

There is also a chapter entitled "How Struts Works" that provides a useful insight into the internal working of Struts. I found this one really exciting.

I would also like to point out that the author has a clear and easy to understand writing style. Examples work well and relevant.

This is a very clear, concise introduction to the Struts framework.
It' s up to date, and present the subject with a learn-by-example strategy. I appreciated the fact that the various aspects of Struts are presented with many little independend manageable examples intead of the typical "example application" that many book use to "put it all together". Overall an excellent text to understand the whys and hows of Struts. Be warned you will not find material on the more sophisticated aspects and usages of Struts, but a good foundation upon which you can build with working experience and more advanced books like "Struts Recipes". Anyhow you can just make up your mind by going to jtutedotcom and checking the entire book online!

The good thing about this book is it teaches you concepts, rather than technicality (which you can browse from Struts' website). It starts with the crucial paradigm that every Struts developer has to fully understand: the Model-View-Controller pattern (aka the Model 2 architecture). Chapter 1 provides you a very good example on MVC, presenting one achieved with servlets/JSP and one with Struts. Once you're comfortable with it, Chapters 2, 3, 4 explain about actions, action forms, and how to configure your Struts application.

Subsequent chapters talk about the Validation framework, an important feature that makes Struts the most popular MVC framework. With Validation, you can validate user input both on the server-side as well as the client side, or both. No need to write Javascript functions as they are generated automatically. This is really a cool feature. The discussion of Validation in this book is more detailed than in other books.

This book also covers Tiles very well. You use Tiles to help you lay out the components in your Web pages. Tiles is dynamic and make it easy to achieve consistent look for your application. Changing the look involves only editing a single file. Again, I feel I have a good grasp of Tiles after reading this book (I've previously read a similar chapter in Manning's Struts in Action book)

After you understand how to program with Struts, the second part of the book talks about design. There are a number of important J2EE design pattern discussed, all of them in plain language.

If you've never learned Struts before, this book is definitely for you. If you've been using Struts, you might still be interested in the design topics which is quite advanced to even seasoned Struts developers.

Excellent book... After reading three other Struts book, this book has several examples that really broke Struts down to where I could easily understand.

The basic motivator is the use of Model - View - Controller as the design basis for a servlet and JSP project. Struts is an instantiation of MVC. The book shows how you can take it and develop a fully fledged servlet package. Elegant formulation.

To be sure, the code examples are sometimes verbose. But that is just a fact of life. Keep a focus on the underlying principles.

The book is not just confined to Struts. Related issues, like using Tiles Framework for factoring out a consistent presentation of web pages, are explained, showing how they interoperate with Struts.

I've used the book to teach struts to my development team. As a Software Factory Company we need the fastest response from our employees even those don't know struts. Is easy to understand struts if you use this book from beginning to end. The JSTL chapter is a great aid and also the persistence chapter. If you want to learn struts get this book, then to refine your skills, buy the one with de horse in the cover.

Before reading this book, I was always confused with some of the tags in the Struts HTML library, especially options and optionsCollection. This book explains not only how to use the components, but also how they work in the background, so you know how to program them correctly. As to options and optionsCollection, according to the author, your array or collection can come from many different sources, such as the application object, the Session object, or even the form itself (depending on the situation). Understanding this makes me code more efficiently. This is the only book I recommend if you're starting Struts or want to grasp the technology better.

Struts itself is not very intuitive, especially for people new to developing web applications.

This book is nice because it covers topics outside of the Struts domain in order to better explain what is going on with Struts and how it interacts with other technologies like Servlets, JSPs, tag libraries, etc.

The author claims that this is a tutorial book, meant to be reader cover-to-cover, but I disagree. At times, there are many details that you might not ever need that can be skipped, but these could make a good reference someday.

Overall, the general concepts are pretty nicely explained, considering the weirdness of Struts, and I can safely recommend it for a beginner or intermediate web app developer.

I just bought this book, looking at the reviews. I must tell you that this book is worth all the 5 stars. I have always tried to read about struts from different websites, and even after understanding the concepts had a bit of fuziness. But the author has a very well understanding of the framework and has written the book, such that a reader does not get overloaded with irrelevant information and understands the concepts one step at a time.

first off, I don't know the authors, and am not connected with the book in any way.

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This book is great. I know Java, and JSPs. Servlets are new to me, but there isn't much to those.

This book got me up and running pretty quickly, especially considering I'm using eclipse to develop the app, and OC4J to compile stuff.

This book obviously didn't have the details for implementing on those platforms, but it had all the info I needed for the other parts.

It has good explanations for the way pieces fit together, and even some very helpful warning tips that keep you from common misunderstandings.

Thanks to the authors!