Struts 2 in Action (In Action)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Don Brown, Chad Davis, Scott Stanlick Our price £18.26 (£31.99) New from £18.26 Used from £15.00 Pages: 432 (Paperback) ISBN: 193398807X Pub: Manning Publications Pub date: 2008-05-15 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 75351

Reader Reviews:

A mixed bag. Webwork in Action is much better.. (0/0 people found this helpful)

In a few places this book shines. I think this is reflected by the fact that different authors wrote different chapters.
Chapter
1 : Good
2-7 : Nauseating. They get the point across. But you're left having to sift out the junk. Not good for busy IT person wanting to get to grips fast.
8 : Excellent
9 : Good. Integration with Spring and Hibernate JPA
10 : OK
11 : Bad.. If I find another book explaining the abbreviation I18N. Then to add insult to injury do it more than once...
12 : Poor 12.3 in particular.. Huh?
13 : OK
14 : Good. Migrating Struts 1 -> Struts 2
15 : Excellent. Best practices.

The bulk of the book has way too much fluff and preamble. of the style.. "We're going to take you on a journey... Are you ready... Let's go".
Also there was too much time is spent regurgitating the same stuff. The editors at Manning did a lousy job here. If I'd have reviewed this text, I swear I'd have put a red line through a third of text. Chapters 2-7 in particular.
I read this book hot on the tail of WebWork in Action. The style of both those authors was so much easier to comprehend. Maybe it's something Manning could put through a readability analyzer. The best way I could describe it was the tempo seemed off. Stick to Webwork in Action. It's more concise and to the point. Then flick through this for the chapters I've highlighted. The fact the waffle was getting my hackles raised most of the time didn't help here. Kept thinking 'Get to the point'.

Could have placed more emphasis on annotations. This way buying both WebWork In Action and this book together would have been more worthwhile.

A dull re-write of online documentation. (3/3 people found this helpful)

Struts 2 is a great framework. But 80% of this book is a dull walk-through, rather than an exploration through some of its more interesting features. You don't need to read several pages of what could be exemplified in a few lines of code and summary text. Also, I buy a book to get more or better consolidated information than what I can find online.

I think this book is aimed at the beginner - I flicked through it and only found one interesting area which was writing a Struts 2 plug-in. But for the most part, you're better off reading the online project docs and looking at some examples (which is free).

The action series has been good before, but this, for the most part, was a waste of money.

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