Mastering Tomcat Development (Paperback)

The information about configuring Realms, especially the Memory and JDBC Realms, is excellent. The 20 pages on security configuration, the Security Manager, and secure webapp development are among the best I've seen. The chapters on server.xml and web.xml are insightful, and the short references in the back of the book provide info not found in the docs. Concise, useful, not repetitive.

I'm ecstatic that someone finally took the Mac seriously enough to give it equal time in the examples to!

Most important, this book recognizes that Tomcat is not used in a vacuum. There are way too many examples to list here, but overall the book does a great job of showing you how to work Tomcat into your complete Java web app development process, and how other Apache tools work in union with Tomcat to give you a complete open source solution.

Most the code examples are pretty short (there are a few more complex apps toward the back of the book) but manage to be realistic, practical, and useful. The authors struck a nice balance here. Also excellent exmaples for connection pools, JDBC, and DAOs.

Kudos to the authors! I have faith in computer books again.

I've read Tomcat: The Definite Guide, and Tomcat Kick Start through my Safari subscription for hours trying to get beyond "Resource not found" error when deploying my first servlet without success. After reading "Mastering Tomcat" for half an hour, I figured out the answer by myself, because finally I understood the theory behind deployment of servlets.
But you know this book is awesome from all the other reviews. Just buy it.

The reason why I am writing this review is that this is my first encounter with ebooks and digital rights.

You can purchase this book immediately on Amazon and download it after about 15 minute wait as an ebook. Instant satisfaction! Well, not quite. The book comes in a special format named "ebook". This format feels like PDF, but comes with Digital Rights Management protection. The DRM protection managed to bring my blood pressure up in about 10 minutes.

- The Acrobat Reader contacts some mother-lode server to check if I have the right to read the book when I open the download.
- I had to sign in with my .NET account to get 'verified' after the download. I wonder what they do for Linux?
- My first attempt to copy a line of code out of the book warned "You have rights to 10 copies in the next week. Are you sure you want to proceed?".

Considering that this is a computer book, and I'd love to copy more than 10 snippets of code in the next week, this was very annoying, and made me regret my electronic purchase.

Ebooks are a great idea for technical manuals. But my recommendation is to stay away from them until the terms under which books are sold are less draconian, and more helpful to the consumer. So get yourself a paper copy, hopefully it'll come with a CD for all that code.

This book is well written and is more than the title suggests--it is really a mini course on Java web development using Tomcat and other cutting edge Jakarta tools. The focus is always on vital concepts and practical techniques that you can put to use every day. The authors do a great job of describing how to integrate Struts, Ant, and other tools with Tomcat to basically create a Java web development environment.

The Tomcat 4.1 coverage is also excellent. I haven't found one 4.1 feature that isn't explained in this book (and better than the docs). Great!