Rating:  - Great Book. One of the best on the subject
Studying is never fun for a lot of people, and reading technical books is always taken as a boring task by a lot of people. This will never be the case with any of the head first series of books.
The head first approach depends on a lot of images, since an image says more than a thousand words. It also depends on repeating the information in different styles, and dialogue like text.
Even though this might seem as if it's a very simple approach, but the result is amazing. The book is fun to read, full of information, and yet very simple. Never thought I would love to study that much again.
Now enough about the head first approach, and into the book itself. The book is very informative, and covers nearly everything in the exam. Very few subjects were not covered, but most of them are covered in the questions at the end of each chapter, with a reference to the place of the information in the specs.
Few mistakes are there (like any book in the market), but most of them are spelling mistakes. The O'Reilly website has a great errata page covering every single mistake in the book (even spelling and grammar mistakes).
A lot of topics covered in the book do not even appear in other books, and a lot of those come in the exam. I studied from that book, and got 94% in the exam. Great book, and really fun to read.
Rating: - Head First JSP: Everything you need except practical experience!
I was introduced to the Head First series after taking a Sun Java course that just didn't convey the material well enough. It was my transition from procedural coding to OO coding, and the concepts didn't quite fit yet. Head First helped solve that with HF Java, and I continued my exploration with HF JSP and Servlets.
The Good: Covers the various incarnations of JSPs... dirty coded JSPs with scriptlets, to well formed tag based jsps, servlets, custom tags and more. Plentiful examples, repeated information (to hammer concepts it). Innovative ways to introduce the material.
The Bad: Some examples seemed too brief. Struts examples seemed like an afterthought. Written to assist in certification passing... may have suffered a bit from this approach.
The Verdict: As with all HF titles, I wholly recommend this one. Even though it is geared towards passing a Sun Certification, it is still a great title-one you'll be hesitant to give up.
Rating:  - Great study book with its own style
This book is very well set up though you must appreciate its particular style of writing. The style contains a lot of informal notes and graphics that are funny and help you in the study process. The authors definitely know their stuff and I am confident that I will be able to pass the SCWCD exam using this book.
Rating: - Head First Servlets and JSP: Passing the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam (SCWCD)
I have read JSP books and tutorials but the subject was never explained as well as Head First Servlets. A must read for anyone planning to take the SCWCD exam.
Rating: - 2 in 1: learn and have fun
This is perhaps the funniest book I've read! And most important: you actually LEARN something :) Kathy and Bert are very good writers and have incredible hability to teach. I own 3 books of them and they are all very good. The book design in principle seemed very strange to me but after the second or third chapter I was just loving it.
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