Rating:  - A little schizo
Mind you, this book has a lot of good info, and I don't regret buying it. However, this book doesn't seem to know its own purpose. From the writing style, you can really tell it was written by different people. At times, it's a tutorial. The first several chapters walk you through an example beer selection app, but then you don't really do hands-on coding ever again, and the app isn't referenced again until the very end. In the middle, the material seems geared towards passing the exam, but there is a lot of information, some well organized and some poorly. The later chapters are verbose and not as helpfully repetitive as the former chapters. It's a good supplemental book, but shouldn't be your main JSP book.
Rating: - An OK introduction to servlets and JSP
I bought this book because of a new work assignment that will require me to be familiar with JSPs and HTTP request/response handling. It does a good job of clarifying things like the difference between Tomcat (a container) and Apache (a Web server), what a servlet is, how requests are received and handled, etc.
I do have a number of complaints, however:
* The book is written in a very "cute" and comical way which really detracts from the content. The first parts were OK but then the attribute/session chapter really lost me. I could do without all the jokes - just a few clear comprehensive sentences would be fine.
* There is only one complete application example that you can try and deploy yourself - that is the "beer selection" app in the first chapters. Later on, when they talk about attributes, JSPs, and so on, they no longer use this app; they just give you small snippets of completely unrelated code. That means if you want to practice these concepts with the app you have, you're on your own.
Rating:  - The best for SCWCD
It's wonderful book. Servlets and JSP definitely are not an exciting Java topic. However that book helped me study in a fun way.
Rating: - Great reading
I liked the way it is written. Although I have expert knowledge in several topics, I still find this book useful as a reference.
Rating: - Disappointing book
If you want to get a certificate that doesn't prove that you can program Java and Servlets/JSP effectively, this is probably a good book.
If you want to actually learn Servlets/JSP this is not the book to get.
I may be a bit biased, because after writing a few JSP applications over the last year, I have been freed of the extremely heavyweight and needlessly messy implementation and have been loving life using Ruby on Rails. Doing something in five lines(that results in a very rudimentary, but usable app) that produces the necessary web pages, database connection and DB IO, that would take hours to do using JSP makes it hard to be fair about any JSP book.
I may also be taking the insane API out on this book as well. JSP was meant to be a relief from the extreme insanity of wring HTML in println statements, and it is. But it is still a very complex solution to a simple problem.
If you have read any Head First books, you know what to expect layout wise. I suppose the book meets its goals, but don't do what I did and expect to learn how to actually use the API in any meaningful way. There is quite a bit of great information, but much of it is not fully presented because the scope of the book is to get you to pass a test. This approach puts the book in a no mans land. If you know JSP and just want to pass the test, there will be a lot of information that you already know, but you still have to dig through it to learn test specific stuff. If you do not know JSP this book will fall woefully short of helping you understand how to leverage the API and Servlet container effectively.
I usually like the presentation of HF(I really like HF Design Patterns, and felt OOAD was pretty good as well), but in this book, it gets in the way of learning. It makes it harder then it really should be.
If you must learn JSP try JavaServer Pages by Bergsten, it is a much better book. If you just want to learn to create dynamic web sites and picked JSP because you know Java, seriously consider Ruby on Rails.
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