The Open Source Zone

I'm disappointed in that the book focuses to much on how to accomplish a task without telling much about the architecture, why and how JSF operates behind the scenes. This results in that you don't exactly know what goes on, and thus don't know how to solve other specific problems. This is primary reason why I'm looking for another book about JSF.

The book contains a lot of complete file code. Not necessarily bad, but keep in mind that the book might have less pure written text than you might expect.

What I like about the book it doesn't only cover standard JSF, but also well known third party frameworks, like Apache Tiles, Facelets, JBoss Seam. Although again, it's also on that part more a how-to.

This book is just loaded with JSF material. Google is still my first choice for answering JSF questions, but when Google can't do it for me, I can usually find what I'm looking for in here.

A good book to have.

Yes, this book will answer most of beginners' questions about how JSF works. No, after it answers them you'll still be looking for answers why.
Yes, if you need to know *how* to program JSF then book's long examples will benefit you. No, if you want to understand *why* things are done that way then a lot of pages could be skipped.
This book is much closer to being specification than it needs to be, but beginner will get good understanding of JSF foundation topics. So for every 'yes' - it's good, there is almost always 'no' - it was not enough.

It's an excellent introduction text to JSF. I like the examples which you can try and learn from the coding experience. It however, is a bit weak on theory, like for instance lifecycles details etc. which isn't a big deficit considering that can be looked up easily. However, I do think a bit more theory in the first couple of chapter would make this book a stronger offering. As for rest of the chapters, the examples are clear and well suited for learning the material and the author's logic/explanations clear and succinct. The chapters are arranged logically, which means by following its order it build you knowledge up nicely. You probably should pickup a book that explains the h: f: tags in more details after this. But this book has the skeletons of everything which wets your appetite for digging deeper into JSF. Overall, a very good introduction.

I got the first and second edition of this book. From the first to the second the book does not get better in knowledge even though Java Server Faces for Java 5 EE gets a lot of powerful components. They are not covered. I was expecting a more deep explanation of how to get the best from Java Server Faces to build Web Applications. For first time purchasers this is a "must have book", but do not expect too much if you have the first edition.