JavaServer Pages : developer's handbook

click here for more details, find new or used items	Nick Todd, Mark Szolkowski Our price £24.19 New from £18.19 Used from £6.99 Pages: 840 (Paperback) ISBN: 0672324385 Pub: Sams Pub date: 2003-06-12 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 460281

Reader Reviews:

A sound introduction (3/3 people found this helpful)

This book perhaps wouldn't be your first choice when deciding to learn JSP. I bought this book because, from the publication date, it seemed to be up-to-date and the authors are English, not that that's unusual.

I've given this book 4 stars. This is because I like the writing style but there are a few silly mistakes that lost the authors that final star. Most, if not all, books have copy errors and thiss book is no exception. That said, I've read worse books for typos. At times though this book can be a little confusing. For example, in chapter 3, a nicely formatted, page long table is provided showing the functions that are available to the Expression Language, but absolutely no indication is given about how to make use of them.

Another flaw is that the source code in the book sometimes doesn't work. This is usually the code that uses the JSTL (Java Standard Tag Library). Given that this is a corner stone of the JSP technology and that part we are supposed to make the most use of, it was a little painful trying to get rid of these errors. Also, the downloadable source code is different in parts to the printed source code but still doesn't work. To be fair to the authors though, the specification to these things is always changing, and book presumably represents the JSTL as it was early to mid 2003, which isn't vastly different to how it stands now. A visit to the Java homepage sorted it for me in the end.

One thing I liked about the book, and something that other books have actually been criticised for, the authors don't shy away from the underlying implementation of JSP. JSPs are compiled into Java Servlets, and it is the author's point of view that it is vital to understand what is going on at this level in order to write well formed JSP code and in my option, this style of learning works well.

In summary, this is a book for Java programmers, not for someone hoping to learn to program using JSP. The flaws in this book, such as they are, should pose no problem to a reasonably skilled Java programmer.

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