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Title: Struts Kick Start by James Turner, Kevin Bedell ISBN: 0-672-32472-5 Publisher: SAMS Pub. Date: 09 December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.99

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Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (24 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: A good choice if you have the right background knowledge
Comment: The Struts framework is becoming a de-facto standard for developing interactive web applications using servlets. If this type of development is something you are responsible for, you should consider getting a copy of this book to help you take the next step in your professional development. The "kickstart" concept means that the authors don't spend a lot of time on fluff or auxilllary material. You are quickly exposed to the core concepts along with a large number of examples to illustrate those technical points.

There are a number of assumptions made in this book. The web server used for examples is the Jakarta Tomcat server. If you're using that platform for your development, you'll be very comfortable with the book. The authors also assume a prerequisite knowledge of JSP, as well as the use of MySQL for writing applications that access data from relational databases. From a cost perspective, this is all good in that you can set up your test environment for free. On the other hand, if you use other packages such as IBM's Websphere Application Server and DB2, you'll have to make the adjustments on your own.

The book is very comprehensive in what it covers, and there is an abundance of code to help you see working examples that you can use for your own purposes. Since I'm not as "up to speed" on servlet technology as I'd like to be, I'd prefer a somewhat slower style for learning. But that's not a knock on the book as much as my own personal preference.

Conclusion
If you're comfortable with web applications, deployment, and servlet coding, this will be a good choice for getting started with Struts. If you're still relatively new to all this, you may want to get a book that doesn't assume quite so much to start with. Once you get familiar with Struts, this would be a good companion book for examples.

Rating: 2
Summary: Doesn't quite cut it
Comment: This book (like many of its type) reads more like a collection miscellaneous notes than a structured, organized text book. It is disjointed and incomplete. Moreover, it encourages bad practices (at least the examples do).

The book fails to intelligently synchronize and present the relationship between the JSP page, the action class, the action form and the struts-config.xml. In fact, you never see the struts-config file (it's kind of important).

The last straw came when I was reading a 4 line section about a particular tag usage. The authors offered this brillant insight - .."for more detail, refer to the Struts documentation"! Gee, thanks...maybe the authors should have given that advise in the introductory paragraph and left the rest of the book blank.

The discussion of and and the mechanism to store and retrieve these data elements to and from the Action Form was ambiguous and misleading. Moreover, hard coding data elements in a Vector inside the JSP is just downright bad practice. The point of Struts is to minimize the need to put java / javascript code in your JSP.

Overall, poorly organized, poorly written and not that useful.

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent Quick Intro To Web Application Design
Comment: Background Info: I started my web app development with PHP/MySQL and I quickly realized how messy PHP can get by dropping logic in with presentation code. I have some background in Java, but not using it in Web Apps. I soon learned about MVC and Struts. I scoured the web for Struts tutorials and if you're like me, found them VERY lacking, very incomplete and very unhelpful. I've struggled with configuring ant, compiling java files by hand all to no avail. There had to be a better way. I finally broke down and got this book.

I was soooo excited to get this book and start my web app development projects using Struts. The book starts off pretty good by disecting a very simple struts application, but it didn't tell you how to run/deploy the application. I figured I could just deploy the app with Ant, (since i've struggled with it before) but I decided to be patient and told myself, perhaps I should finish reading the entire book first before I start writing web apps.

Then the book transitioned to what I believed to be a somewhat complex struts app for beginners. The authors do a good job in dissecting the code and explaining how it works, but again, no help in how to run and deploy the application. I felt like I was being rushed.

Later on, I started to get bored and began skimming the book. The stuff near the end was getting complex and I still was shaky on the easy stuff. I read the first couple of pages of EJBs with Struts and Web Services with Struts. They were interesting, but I wasn't ready to get into that yet, I still felt like I was missing something.

I still recommend that you get this book. If you're new to web application development, this book really breaks down best practices and demistifies web app buzzword terms such was MVC, EJBs, J2EE web services, SOAP and other things a web app developer should know, but you will get it shoved down your throat. Be warned, this book isn't for beginners. It's for those who have been struggling really really hard trying to learn struts on your own through tutorials on the web. You should be somewhat already familiar with Ant, (or you can get that shoved down your throat too), setting up environment variables, Tomcat, Databases and some database terms (primary key, auto increment, things like that). I had to tweek the build.xml and build.properties files to work in my environment. That didn't bother me too much because I learned something in the process.

I'm not dissapointed in the book because I learned so much from it. Had I not already struggled with Struts and learning how to write java based web apps, I'd be lost. If you're someone like me, it's worth it. Get it.

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