Programming Jakarta Struts

Having read other reviews I bought this as an introduction to struts and am very happy with it. It explains the technology well, moving from a high level introduction to good practical examples and code. Just what I was looking for.

Good, but not the one if you want to start coding in a hurry (2/8 people found this helpful)

I bought this book, with the intention of being a Struts Guru in 2 weeks time. Well if thats the case, then I think that this book is not for you then.
This book goes in strength in explaining the internal working of the Struts components. It starts with many semi-baked applications, including a banking application. Sadly, there is no explanation after the inital chapter. This book lacks example-on-the-hands way to get your app designed and developed. Its all in bits and pieces, and you need to navigate among everything to get an idea.

Anyway, you could get this book ordered, as it looks good on your desk, with other colleagues coming and staring at the book and nodding at you approvingly !

Don't waste your money (5/5 people found this helpful)

In a word, impenetrable. By chapter 5, I still didn't have the working knowledge to send a request to a Struts servlet! The author seems to be more interested in letting us know how great his understanding is of the internals of Struts that he can find little time to let us learn how to actually employ the framework.

Furthermore, the writing style is too dry and reliant on tables of data and xml schemas, and not enough on working examples and discussion. Learning by doing, this isn't.

Good but not the best (3/3 people found this helpful)

A comprehensive covering of struts but not as good as "Struts in Action". The basics are well-covered but the lack of flow hinders easy learning and I find that I turn to other books first rather than this one. That said, like all O'Reilly books, it's well written and authoritative and certainly not a waste of money.

Good introduction but lacking in places (2/2 people found this helpful)

This book definitely contains enough information for an experienced Java developer to start using Struts quickly. I like the book but do have some gripes about it.

The author mentions wizard-style html forms on several occassions in the book, emphasising their usefulness and popularity amongst web developers. Rather than providing the reader with a decent worked example, he leaves us with a few clues and the comment that "This can be a little tricky". I had to download and read the Struts source to really understand how multi-page forms should be configured and used.

I was especially disappointed with the chapter on exception handling. I was rather hoping for an example illustrating how an error can be trapped in an Action class and subsequently used by a jsp page. It just wasn't there. Instead the reader is given an overview of how the JVM searches up the call stack until it finds an appropriate catch block for an exception - something I am sure the target audience doesn't need to be told. The benefits of exception chaining and not exposing low-level exceptions in a client interface should already be familiar to most developers.

I was really looking for a book with more comprehensive examples throughout. Although it contains a lot of code snippets and sufficient explanation of each class in the framework, it fails to expand on the more advanced topics. Overall I felt the book didn't provide a unified description of the subject and I was left having to work out the missing pieces for myself.

Programming Jakarta Struts

Chuck Cavaness

Reader Reviews:

Excellent introduction and beginners guide (1/2 people found this helpful)

Good, but not the one if you want to start coding in a hurry (2/8 people found this helpful)

Don't waste your money (5/5 people found this helpful)

Good but not the best (3/3 people found this helpful)

Good introduction but lacking in places (2/2 people found this helpful)

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