Customer Reviews

Struts 2 Design and Programming: A Tutorial (A Tutorial series)

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

 

 

I'm convinced this is and will remain the authoritative book on Struts 2. I know that more are being written but I don't care. You will not find one better.

I've never worked with Struts 2 in the past yet I was able to get a pretty solid understanding of it in a very short amount of time. Granted, I've had plenty of experience with the original Struts, JSF, and other web technologies, but I think even a beginner could pick this up fairly easily.

I let a friend of mine who had used Struts 2 on a project before skim through my copy of Struts 2 Design and Programming to check for any gaping holes or errant information before writing this review. It passed his inspection. (Thanks, Eric!)

I initially was a little skeptical when I saw that this Struts 2 book includes many other topics like DAOs, Velocity, FreeMarker, Dojo, and JFreeChart. These sections actually turned out quite pleasant to read and were great introductions to those topics without taking anything away from the main topic: Struts 2.

When you start making your way into chapters 5 and 6, feel free to jump around to other chapters. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the many tags in Struts 2 and, even with the author's great explanations and examples, can become a little tiresome for a cover-to-cover kind of read (but makes for a terrific reference). I suggest coming back to these chapters every once in a while to chew off two or three of the tags at a time. I expect this tip will add to your reading enjoyment.

Overall, this is a terrific book and I highly recommend it to anyone working with or curious about Struts 2.

This book is definitely not for a "casual read". What you'll find here is information written as if it were the design documentation for the Struts 2 project. EXTREMELY detailed, this will most likely be your troubleshooting guide and information resource whenever you work with or get stuck somewhere in the framework.

The author goes with a "no fluff" approach to the book and the 500+ pages are nothing but details, details, details (aka, meat). There's plenty in the book that you probably won't need/use more than once or twice; but when you do, you'll be glad to have this reference for the general lookup and troubleshooting the intricacies and details of Struts (I haven't had it long and I already found pieces that are contained within that are just blatantly missing from other texts).

The book really exposes Struts 2 and its inner workings. You will need to take what is there and completely rework it for you application (it's not a "copy-and-paste-from-me" book), but you will understand thoroughly what is happening under the covers.

This is also the first book I've read so far that covers the "default, no-config" option available in Struts 2. It's finally nice to have a reference that goes over the default information so that you aren't declaring everything explicitly until it works the way you want it to. You can just check this book out and figure out which parameters, constants, etc. you need to override/alter.

It's a heavy "general" read, but it's a wonderful, light reference.

The only reason I can't give it 5 stars is due to the overall formatting. The sections of the text are separated as if it were being displayed on a basic web page, wiki, etc. It just made narrowing down what's on the page to your specific needs a little harder than usual.

PS - don't let it's size fool you, it really is COMPLETELY packed

The book is for people who have a solid understanding of the servlet/JSP api. Some of the examples in the book require a little extra work on your part since the it does not layout every step. However if you do put the effort and go over the chapters thoroughly, you'll find that there's a wealth of information in here.

I have a moderate amount of experience w/ Struts1 but am relatively inexperienced w/ Struts2. I found this to be an excellent book covering a wide range of Struts2 topics in a very readable and approachable fashion. Really clarified a lot of the material I'd been reading in the online docs.

Highly recommended!

I'm really happy I bought this book, even though I'd be happier if it was true what the title says: this book doesn't say anything about design.

It shows much about syntax and about what possibilities Struts 2 gives you, but if you aren't a good designer your designs won't still be good after reading this book. I know there are other good books about designing struts applications, this is not one of them.

Anyway, if you are looking for the best way to do something with struts 2, this book will show how in a technical view (take care from a design view).

this is just a rehash of struts1 book from the same author, took the old format and replaced the struts1 stuff with struts2 2, the problem is t struts2 needs more indepth coverage in order to understand correctly, example author never explains what's the need for OGNL, how is it useful?
you will have more questions than answers when you are done with this book without understanding the innerworkings of struts 2

I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to start Struts2, Author gave very good examples in the book very helpful book. I call it a reference book for Struts 2.

I really like and recommend "Struts 2 Design and Programming 2nd Ed." for new (and not so new) Struts 2 developers. This teaches Struts 2 using a tutorial style with complete small examples.

This is not an encyclopedia. Rather it gives you a short but thorough introduction to struts basics and specialized topics like validation, tags and file upload. See the table of contents.

After reading this book you are well prepared to fill in the gaps by mousing around the internet and getting more details.

The first thing I did was look up file uploading in Struts. The book's instructions are incorrect (a wrong method name is given). That cost me an hour of pointless debugging.

That initial experience, plus numerous typos and grammatical errors, do not inspire confidence. It's back to Amazon for this book.

It's a shame, because the author's tutorial approach is pretty good. A little proofreading would have gone a long way here.

This is a poor example of a "tutorial." The first example is incomplete and completely glosses over the build and deployment process. The rear cover suggests "This book is for beginners as well as seasoned programmers..."

It is not for beginners. The first example cannot be completed with only the information in the book. Furthermore, the example code website mentioned in the book is not in sync with the example in the book. From a very quick glance at [...] you can get what limited value this "tutorial" has to offer for free without spending any money at all.

Don't buy this book, I will be returning mine.