internet applications

I'm surprised this book has been so well received. As an experienced java guy and web developer, I feel I should have been able to read a book like this through and end up with a good working knowledge of Struts, but this isn't the case. For a start, there is a lot of filler in this book just taking up space (a lot of it, double-spaced with wide margins). For example, not only are there plenty of source listings in the body of the text (including some from the struts source, to give you a "look inside") but there are chapters such as number 4 on the HTTP protocol and 5 on JSP and servlets. Not only is this sort of information widely available elsewhere, it is pretty unnecessary in a book obviously targeted at people with a working knowledge of web applications and java in particular.

The other chapters did not do a good job in my view of explaining the struts framework. There was ample description of the example classes (such as beans, with all their getters and setters printed in the book) which was very easy to follow, but the coverage on bringing it all together was poor. For example, from the chapter on struts-config.xml there's only one sentence on what the "input" attribute to the action tag means: "The input attribute allows the action to redirect back to the form that was used to enter the form values by specifying its path." I feel this could have been explained a little better! Why devote 4 or 5 pages of the book to listing the source of a trivial javabean and then shortchange the reader on the descriptions of the actual subject?

I'm going to buy another book, I suggest you also might want to think about starting elsewhere.

First, this book was published in 2002, which means it was written in 2001. Rather out of date.

I have three very major complaints.
1. The author, like almost all Struts book authors, starts right off the bat giving examples of JSP files that include Struts tags...a topic that is not covered until many chapters later! So the beginner (me) is left scratching his head wondering what all this gibberish is about. How much easier it would have been to provide the early examples in HTML and then later show them using tags AFTER tags have been introduced and discussed.

2. There are l-o-n-g sections of nothing but HTML/JSP code with almost no commenting. Do ANY publishers get it that they don't need to print EXACT code listings? The printed page could have arrows and circles and bold print highlighting codes snipets and discussing what they do. This book leaves it up to the reader to find the important nuggets in hundreds of lines of code.

3. Certain sections are so terse as to be meaningless, and even go so far as to tell the reader to look at the Struts documentation and then you'll understand it all. HELLO?? That's why I bought the &%$#!! book.

On the plus side, the font is nice, there is plenty of white space and it is easy on the eyes.

Skip this one. This is my 5th Struts book and I'm STILL looking for a good one. I think a good rule is that if a book is written by an open-source code author, avoid it like the plague. Coders are NOT writers. Unfortunately, the editors don't seem to be writers either. Maybe that job was outsourced...

This book (like many of its type) reads more like a collection miscellaneous notes than a structured, organized text book. It is disjointed and incomplete. Moreover, it encourages bad practices (at least the examples do).

The book fails to intelligently synchronize and present the relationship between the JSP page, the action class, the action form and the struts-config.xml. In fact, you never see the struts-config file (it's kind of important).

The last straw came when I was reading a 4 line section about a particular tag usage. The authors offered this brillant insight - .."for more detail, refer to the Struts documentation"! Gee, thanks...maybe the authors should have given that advise in the introductory paragraph and left the rest of the book blank.

The discussion of <html:select> and <html:options> and the mechanism to store and retrieve these data elements to and from the Action Form was ambiguous and misleading. Moreover, hard coding data elements in a Vector inside the JSP is just downright bad practice. The point of Struts is to minimize the need to put java / javascript code in your JSP.

Overall, poorly organized, poorly written and not that useful.