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Professional JSP (897 pages) is published by Wrox and written by a
team of 16 different authors, it benefits from the different
experiences of each of the authors.
The book contains twenty chapters and a further six
appendices. The twenty chapters are split into two groups, the first
15 chapters that covers JavaServer Pages (JSP) in detail, and then a
further five chapters each of which is a Case Study.
This book covers both JSP 1.0 and 1.1. It also contains a wealth of
other useful information, for example the information on cookies and
their problems in Chapter 5, JSP Sessions. This detailed
coverage of indirect but vitally important information is kept up all
the way through the book. Its obvious that the authors are practitioners
in JSP, as they cover problems encountered every day by people
learning the technology. For example, the problems with HTTP and
HTTPS sessions not sharing cookies.
This is an excellent book - my recommendation for anyone working with
JSP's or JSP tag libraries - go out and buy it. My only major
criticism would be that in Chapter 1, Introducing JavaServer
Pages, there is too much focus on how JSP's are converted to
Servlets, along with the servlet listings - which is possibly too
confusing for those just starting out on JSP.
Chapter 4, JSP and JavaBeans, covers JSP and databases but
spends most of the 20 pages devoted to creating and setting up the
EJB's and database, the actual time spent on JSP lasts fro around 4
pages. Even then it only covers displaying one row of data from the
database. It would have been very useful to have seen how the authors
would have tackled the requirement for displaying many rows, or
navigating through one row at a time.
Some of the examples are of limited use, and would have perhaps have
been more valuable if some thought had gone into making the examples
more robust, for example the browse catalog example in Chapter 5 could
have done with a order quantity column.
The book focuses too much on the Tomcat server, and doesn't show how
to make use of the two leading Java web servers: IBM's Websphere and
BEA's WebLogic. It would have been useful to have shown how to setup,
use and configure JSP on these two servers as well. Chapter 7,
Java Database Connectivity and Connection Pooling, includes
code to create a database connection pool, but it would have been
better to have shown how to configure the connection pooling already
present WebLogic and Websphere.
Despite these minor criticisms, there are still gems throughout the
book. For example Chapter 7 includes simple but effective code to
benchmark a JSP/JDBC application - useful if you don't have the budget
for expensive test tools.
The only omission, is the lack of coverage of Web ARchive (WAR)
files. Only briefly mentioned in one of the appendices.
The Case Studies include:
- Implementing a Membership Based E-Commerce Application
- J2EE, EJB's, and Tag Libraries
- Streaming Data with JSP
- Weather with JSP, XSLT, and WAP
- Porting ASP to JSP
Depending on your work, you may or may not find these useful. the
amount of JSP within each one is on the low side. These are more
generally applications that happen to make use of JSP at the
front. Nevertheless this maybe just what you need to start making use
of JSP with larger applications.
There are five main appendices:
- configuring Apache and Tomcat
- JSP Syntax reference
- JSP and Servlet API Reference
- HTTP
- JSP for ASP developers
As you can see there is a small bias to the book for existing ASP
developers, although there is not a requirement to know ASP.
Conclusion
Buy this book! I keep this book to hand wherever I go. I've been
working with JSP for the last year, and this is the first book that
covers JSP in enough detail to warrant spending money.
Available to buy from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de
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