The Open Source Zone

This book as all of us seem to agree starts off well. But after Chapter 3 the quality just goes down. It explains how to use plugins and RequestProcessor just like a manual would without delving into situations where it might be helpful. I found it utterly useless and am going to return it. There was a time when I picked a WROX book eyes shut and got decent quality but this book was a complete let down.

The book starts off really well. It contains alot of detailed explanation of how things work. But the main problem with this book is that it was not proof read(QAd). The errors weren't huge, but they are really irritating. Instead of focusing on trying out the examples, you focus on getting the example to work. For me, it was just too irritating to follow along. I still use the book as a reference, but for learning purposes, SKIP.

I see loads of developers complaining about coding practices, OS installation details, etc. - but the bottom line is this -
If you want to learn Struts and you have a good JSP background to begin with, this book will get you up to speed quickly and prepare you for a Struts project. From a developers perspective, that is really the most important thing. It delivers on explaining complex things simply, clearly and with a very good flow of information. You can learn Struts from this one book.

I bought other books that let me down on learning Struts. But I found this little gem (perfect for other writers to follow this learning method) and I finally understand and learn, -yes learn-, Struts.

Other books like Kick Start Struts are very bad designed for "more dummies" and they obscure things adding other frameworks like Torque!?

Thanks Guys!

I have five Struts books and this is the best by far. There is NO fluff in it. It has THE BEST appendices of any Struts book, showing the tag library calls. (It makes a great reference book.) The examples are clean and get right to the point. I liked the style where they show one way to achieve a goal, explain how it can be done better, then show a better way, etc., refining the example as they go.

I also liked the short, to-the-point chapters on using Struts with Eclipse, databases, Tiles, etc. This is the only book I've read that made it clear how to use Tiles.

There are two down-sides to this book. First, it has an poor index, which is normally the kiss of death on a technical book. Secondly, the example code that is on the web-site is a mess! Those are the reasons I gave this a 4-star instead of a 5-star rating. (Some of the code may be out of date, too, but I have given up expecting a printed book to be current with programming API's that seem to change daily.)

On top of all that, the price is right!