Rating:  - Excellent for Servlet/JSP developers
The JSP Standard Tag Library is designed to simplify many of the difficult tasks encountered while creating JSPs. This book covers the new built-in tags and the expression language which are part of JSTL. The book describes itself as a "definitive" guide and that fairly well sums it up. JSTL is covered in excellent detail with lots of examples and sample code. The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces JSTL and discusses the JSTL expression language. Examples of proper usage as well as common errors are shown. The next part covers the tags themselves (referred to as actions). This part is split over several chapters including chapters on conditional actions, iteration actions, i18n actions, database actions, and XML actions. Each action is covered in detail with at least one example of its usage. The final section is a short reference covering all the actions. Overall, I found this book to be very well written guide to JSTL. I think most Servlet/JSP developers will find this to be an excellent resource for learning JSTL. There were a couple of places in the book that I found the author's explanations a little confusing but overall he does an excellent job of helping to understand how to properly use JSTL.
Rating:  - I love this book!
Among the few books available on JSTL, I chose to buy this book. After 2 visits to a local bookstore, I determined that this book explains the JSTL technology clearer than other JSTL books.
Also, the through examples in this book have been well thought out in depth and cover almost all of common usage of JSTL. Particularly, I like the chapters on database programming.
The paper quality of this book is also very good unlike other cheap books. One downside is that ...suppose to have the source code listed in the book but I have not been able get on it since I bought the book.
Rating:  - Welcome Addition with Reservations
I like Geary and have his Swing book ( which is in my opinion the definitive tome on the subject ). He's a good author. This new outing covers the tags quite well and with some good practical insights. There are a few things that I just would have done differently had I been the writer, but I liked the formatting and I18N chapters, perhaps the best ones out of the lot.
However, there is not even a mention of the JSP 1.2 XML syntax or how to use JSTL with it, which is [imho] a pretty glaring oversight. In the sample code none of the beans implement 'Serializable' which according to the javaDocs, is a bean requirement. The DTD the samples point to is erroneous. You have to type the samples in because the site from where you are supposed to be able to download them doesn't exist.
For someone who was so meticulous in his previous books, I find this one written by a different Geary. Maybe this is the case. But it did get me on top of the JSTL pretty quickly and that gets 3 stars. There is not much else out there on this subject at the moment.
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