Rating:  - Great reference to expand usage of Struts
I was very pleased with the examples in the book and the ability to apply them to everyday struts problems. The upgrading sections were particularly useful in my case, but I have found uses for many other of the recipes in this book.
There were some examples that required a bit more research on my part, but the author was very helpful and responsive when a question did arise concerning a recipe.
This book is a great companion for any Struts Application Developer.
Rating:  - Excellent book for novice and experts
Great book for learning how struts works in the real world. It has great point solutions to common problems, which also help with the understanding of the struts framework. And nice, easy to read flow, with complete examples. The best thing about a cookbook is that you don't have to go in any sequence through all the chapters, you can find the problem in the content and jump right to it.
I would recommend buying a struts reference book in addition to this, and when you do that make sure it covers the latest version of struts.
Rating: - Great Book even for a newbie!
I am a Struts newbie and have been working with Struts for only two weeks yet the Jakarta Struts Cookbook helped me build a Wizard-Style page Flow application (pages 199 to 203 in the book). Without this book I would have been totally lost and probebly very frustrated. One thing I really liked is that the author chose to use the LookupDispatchAction rather than having an Action for each step in a wizard-style application.
As I look through the book I can see there are very insightful and intuitive recipe's for dealing with future projects like pages 90 to 95 on how to Handle Date Input Fields.
Even if you are a Struts newbie this book will help you figure out how to do specific advanced tasks. If you are looking for quick information to add to your projects then this book is a great buy.
Rating: - Good Struts meal cooked by Bill Siggelkow
This books has a very strong collection of common and day to day programming problems with struts.Topics varied from introductory topics like (installation , Configuration , User Interface) to Advanced topics like (Lazy Dynamic Forms,Exception handling , Security , Tiles).
Every Chapter in this book provide smart solutions for common problems faces the developers.
The solutions usually provide a shortcut way for solving with deep discussion for every solution.
The books has about over 130 problems.Each problem has a smart solution with clear and deep discussion.
I think this is the most effective way to transport working experience.
I'm 2 years struts developer.
Personally I enjoyed the discussion of Hibernate and Spring usage with struts.I gained new and good information about the new struts version 1.2.
I think this book will be very useful for any struts developer who wants to absorb the others experiences for old faced problems or new ones.
Rating:  - OK, but has significant problems
Although this book is not a total waste of money, it has deficiencies.
- Many of the recipes could have gone into a lot more detail with more code samples. Some of the solutions were pretty sparse on detail, leading you in the right direction but leaving it up to you to research the specifics. For example, there are a few pages devoted to using the Display Tags library. In fact this library's docs on the developer's website are vague and incomplete and lack any serious code samples. The purpose of paying money for a tech book is to fill in that gap. However, this book did not do so.
- There is a whole chapter of UI-related recipes that show you how to set up data tables on JSP pages with sorting and paging. However all of these techniques have been superceded by the display tag library, rendering all of these recipes a total waste of paper. (The display tag library potentially allows you to do the same things as in the recipes in minutes as opposed to hours, if you have some information on how to use it.) It would have been much more useful if that same amount of pages had been devoted to a clear and complete treatment of how to use the display tag library.
- Some of the prose is terrible. Consider this gem from the "Using Plug-ins for Application Initialization" recipe: "The set-property element takes two attributes: name and value. Struts calls the setter method for the property identified by the value of the name attribute, setting the property to the String value of the value attribute."
What you're paying for, specifically, in a tech book is a CLEAR explanation of the topic. When I put down my hard-earned cash for a book, open it up, and find a garbled mess, it's really annoying. The publisher is supposed to employ editors to make sure that sentences such as the ones above don't make it into print.
That said, there is some good information in this book and I would recommend it on that basis. But the author and publisher could have done a much better job.
|
