Rating: 
Summary: Good Intro to struts, nice "best" practices... Needs editor!
Review: A slew of spelling, grammar (and English is not my first language!) and code erros that definitely make it harder to understand and less useful.
It is a good intro book to struts - maybe its main strength. It also gives some good advice on how to use struts properly.
It is NOT the definitive resource.
Rating: 
Summary: Best book to come upto speed with Struts
Review: After having worked almost entirely with back end for nearly 4 years, I am having my second take at web tier development with J2EE. Things have changed a lot since my last stint. I found myself using Struts. I picked this book because of some of the positive reviews for this book. Plus the lead developer on our project asked me to read this book. This book turned out to be a good one. I especially liked the Chapter 1 that made a case for Struts very well. By the end of Chapter 2 and 3 I found myself writing simple Struts applications. Chapter 4 had some intermediate level stuff like Struts Actions and some practical advices on using Struts. I was pretty surprised since this book took me to an intermediate stage in a new technology (for me) in just under 40 pages. Chapter 6 is pretty cool. It talks about quite a bit of advanced tag stuff like
1) customizing image button tags to isolate the Action changes
2) JSTL and Struts-EL
3) A good scheme for multi page navigation (prev, next etc) when the result set is quite large (I am itching to use this at work)
4) Using Pager Taglib with Struts
5) Editing Form with tables. One small grouse I have regarding this chapter is that it made me refer back to Struts project doucmentation. The chapter states that in the begining that it doesnt repeat tag related docs available publicly. I think it would have been good if all tag info was in the book (even if it was repetition). This chapter is targetted to working developers. For a beginer like me, it took a while to digest this. But once I was through it, it is good. Chapter 9 is pretty heady stuff. Exception handling in combination with Struts is covered to the last detail. What I liked about the chapter is that, it talks about the exception handling not just from a Struts application but at the system level. Having developed ejb aplications myself and had to pass on exceptions to web tier, I very much appreciate the picture presented in this chapter. I call it "my concise guide to better production support". The chapter is a dense read however. Chapter 10 seems to be another goodie. I havent had time to read it yet, but I find the lead developer in our project using some stuff out of this chapter to develop to develop framework in our project. Overall I must say, I am very pleased with this book. A lot of us are in hurry to come upto speed with new technology and dont have time to read thick books on Struts that start with introduction to J2EE Servlet specification. This book was such a relief. I recommend it to anybody starting on Struts.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book on Struts
Review: An excellent resource to understand struts, kept very simple and precise to the point. Every chapter is written from the developer's viewpoint. Thanks to the author for coming up with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Only for begineers who don't want to do things right
Review: By the time I got to chapter 4 I had almost given up on the book, it has a large number of mistakes, most of the code doesn't work as its presented. Luckily I have been doing struts for a couple of years and was able to get thru it. This may be an ok quick review but as far as best practices it isn't even close. As a matter of fact it does some things just plain wrong.
Rating:
Summary: OK Technically, needed an english language review
Review: Content is fine. The usage of the english language is odd throughout the book. Lots of tense mismatches and grammatical errors. Where was the editor? It's not bad enough to prevent comprehension, but it is consistently noticeable.
Rating: 
Summary: Where was this book when I was struggling with List Forms?
Review: Great book. Found a lot of useful advice. Of all, I missed this book's advice when I was struggling in my previous project with the List Forms. I did not know the strategy illustrated in this book and devised my own hack. As one of the review pointed out, I too found chapters 4, 6, 9 and 10 very useful and informative although I knew Struts and using it for over a year now.
Rating:
Summary: Mistakes abound
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer in the sense that the book contains unacceptable basic mistakes, that would have you reading the online docs (what's the use of this book then ?)
On the other hand, the chapter on exception handling is a gem.
Rating:
Summary: Tons of valuable advice
Review: I am avid reader. This is my third Struts book. I went for it since my opinion was "it is inexpensive what the heck". Boy! was I in for a surprise or what... Since I knew Struts already, I skimmed through the initial introductory chapters. I found some good advice that no other Struts book/online materials offered me so far. Here are some I found (in)valuable: 1) Action Chaining 2) The right way to use Image Buttons for Form Submission 3) Some good JSTL and Struts-EL stuff 4) A great Page Traversal framework. 5) Using Pager Taglib with Struts 6) An expert treatise of Exception Handling that goes far beyond "Here is how you confugure exception in struts-config.xml" and tells
a) When to use Struts declarative exception handling and when not to
b) How Struts exception handling complements Servlet exception handling
c) How to log exceptions in a customer-support friendly way so that they can be cross referenced?
d) How to prevent duplicate logging?
e) Strategies for centralized logging
f) Reporting exceptions 7) Customizing Struts to get some real benefits out of it such as:
a) How to fill the gap between ImageButton and DispatchAction, that's so missing
b) Controlling duplicate form submission in a generic manner rather than dealing with it in a per form basis
c) A pageflow controller
d) A like functionality when images are used for the cancel button
Rating:
Summary: Tons of valuable advice
Review: I am avid reader. This is my third Struts book. I went for it since my opinion was "it is inexpensive what the heck". Boy! was I in for a surprise or what...Since I knew Struts already, I skimmed through the initial introductory chapters. I found some good advice that no other Struts book/online materials offered me so far. Here are some I found (in)valuable: 1) Action Chaining 2) The right way to use Image Buttons for Form Submission 3) Some good JSTL and Struts-EL stuff 4) A great Page Traversal framework. 5) Using Pager Taglib with Struts 6) An expert treatise of Exception Handling that goes far beyond "Here is how you confugure exception in struts-config.xml" and tells
a) When to use Struts declarative exception handling and when not to
b) How Struts exception handling complements Servlet exception handling
c) How to log exceptions in a customer-support friendly way so that they can be cross referenced?
d) How to prevent duplicate logging?
e) Strategies for centralized logging
f) Reporting exceptions 7) Customizing Struts to get some real benefits out of it such as:
a) How to fill the gap between ImageButton and DispatchAction, that's so missing
b) Controlling duplicate form submission in a generic manner rather than dealing with it in a per form basis
c) A pageflow controller
d) A <html:cancel> like functionality when images are used for the cancel button
Rating:
Summary: Very well written
Review: I found this book better written and better organized than
The Struts Framework by Sue Spielman
I really like the way they build up explaining struts one concept at a time.
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