Customer Reviews

Struts Recipes

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a recipe cook book you start off with what you want to do, bake a cake perhaps. In this book the same philosophy is used to introduce the use of Struts to build business applications.

The general rule is for a desirable function to be defined and then there's a recipe to get that task done.

One of the desirable tasks so discussed is Alternate Row Colors in a Table. They break this task down into a few standard sections:

define the problem
Background of why you might want this Recipe
Discussion
Reference

This same treatment is given to a hundred or more tasks. The may not all fit your needs (yet), but this is almost a painless way to learn what the Struts do that he is using to implement the task.

This is not a beginners book, you should have some idea about writing in Java, and it would be very helpful to have some background using ANT.

This is a no-nonsense well written set of solutions to common Struts issues. It's certainly not an introduction to Struts and doesn't intend to be. This is a reference work for Struts users who are looking for canned solutions to problems like Tomcat security, Internationalization, or bread crumb trails. Each solution has a short description of the problem (with some background supplied), then the solution recipe and a discussion of the solution.

This is an easy to use, and read, reference format that works well for situations where you have a loosely organized set of common problems. Check the table of contents to make sure that you are getting solutions to the problems you face. If you find topics that interest you rest assured that they are covered well in the book.

WOW!

I read some good reviews about this book in this forum and decided to give it a chance. This book is best for working with Struts. You can learn everything you need to know quite simply and quickly and then use the book later as a reference. There's no question about it, the book does an excellent job of describing the various elements of the struts framework. The explanations are clear, simple and concise!

Bottom line: Highly Recommended

As an experienced programmer I really needed a book that could take me a step further in Struts development.

This is a book I keep reading over and over as it contains solutions to real-life problems.

Thanks George, for giving us such a gem!

This book is written the way we think while we are in the middle of one of those everyday problems.

To the rescue - "Struts Recipes".

If you need to know how to solve that one dogging - gotcha issue, you can look it up and make use of one of the many prescribed recipes.

Topics range from building your application in a well structured way to making your application secure and safe.

Easy to read and well covered.

This book is perfect for people who "learn as they code"
(as oppose to those who learn as they read).

Each task is well defined with clear problem statement and
easy-to-follow implementation steps.

Better yet, all implementations are backed by "best practice" --
which means you won't get embarrased at work during code reviews :)

This book is also great for developers who know the basics and
are now thinking, "what else can I do with Struts?"

There are lots to explore... and this book will open the door for you.

During my project developing my e-commerce web site, I keep this book by my side. It has tremendous useful strategies which helps to solve real-life business problems.

The book is written in very organized manner. Define the task, Explain the background, provide solution and recommend the best practice. It is easy to read and the topics in the book are well covered.

It is truly a 'must-have' for building solid business applications.

J2EE consultant and Struts authority George Franciscus and web engineer Danilo Gurovich present Struts Recipes, a programming guide written especially for developers and architects who need to craft secure, robust, and maintainable applications, particularly for business or commercial use. Chapters instruct the reader in how to unit test an application for function, performance, and coverage; how to make an application secure; how to integrate with Hibernate; dealing with exceptions; generating alternative views with PDF and XSL; how to design a layered Struts application; and much more. Each offered recipe is designed to be adaptable to the user's need, as well as speedy to learn and apply, and the list of recommended "best practices" such as "Do not use wild cards in Ant scripts" and "Prefer classes over interfaces to store constants" will keep one's code legible and easily modifiable to co-workers, assistants or successors. A "must-have" for any serious-minded Struts programmer.

I am clearly in the minority here, as all other reviewers gave this book a very high rating. Although I don't feel that I got my money's worth, obviously a fair number of people are satisfied with the book.

I was unhappy with the large number of errors and typos in the book. Tech books from all publishers tend to have a lot of typos, but Struts Recipes has even more than most.

For example, on page 183 a recipe begins this way: "For the purposes of this recipe, the underlying information we wish to make viewable is a java.util.Vector of maps with COUNTRIES, CITIES, ALTITUDE, and POPULATION as the keys." (Capitals in original.) However a few sentences later we have "Once the map is created, it is inserted into the List." And indeed, in the code sample that follows, the "java.util.Vector" has become an ArrayList.

Also...

- In the first sentence, "maps" should be "Maps" with the letters "M", "a", and "p" in code typeface and the "s" in Roman.
- In the sentence beginning "Once the map is created..." the word "map" should be "Map" in code typeface. What's really amazing is that the editor gave the word "List" the correct treatment in the very same sentence!
- It makes no sense to pluralize "COUNTRIES" or "CITIES". They should be singular because the names of the keys are (or would be -- see below) "COUNTRY" and "CITY".
- In the code sample, there is no Map key called "CITY" or "CITIES". However, there is a key called "CAPITAL".
- The names of the keys should have been set off with quotes or by putting them in code typeface.
- In the next sentence we have "The first listing, 4.5, shows the IterateTest class with the method to obtain the Collection we'll be using, getGeo()." In the code sample the method is not called "getGeo()". It's "getCountries()".

That's somewhere around seven errors in one page, depending on what you consider an error and what you consider merely poor style.

Another problem I had with the book is that some recipes were totally inadequate. For example on page 247 there is a recipe on server-side validation using the Struts Validator Framework. The authors leave out several crucial pieces of information. In order to get the Struts Validator to work, certain settings must be done in struts-config.xml, including setting an ActionMapping's "input" attribute. The authors don't even mention this. They simply left it out.

Later, they explain the effect of a failed validation by saying "if the field is left blank by the end user, it fails and propagates the errors.required key ... in the property file." They don't give any explanation of what they mean by "propagates". How does the developer display the message to the end user? The information is simply not there.

Although I wasn't happy with this book, I should say that I did get some useful information out of it. I was not able to get enough information about the topics most important to me, but it would not be fair to say that the money was completely wasted. In particular, the explanation of resource bundles was reasonably adequate.

In the past I've bought books published by Manning that were really great. However, Manning really fell down on the job with this one.