Rating: 
Summary: Good for beginners but full of mistakes 2.5/5
Review: I found this book very useful to take me from total novice to - one month experience. After this the book is not a lot of use. I am not here to bag the book but here are the facts. It is riddled with spelling errors, (not that I can spell), grammar, and code errors. Fortumately most of these were obvious but still very annoying. It has a really good step by step section on what happends with a request in struts, which classes and methods are called and how to set up your first app. The best practices stuff is more about personal coding style. There are long chapters on actions and validation, but it falls very far short on struts tags (30/210) pages not nearly enough. Almost nothing on iterating though beans to display data, so critical to most apps. a whole chapter on 18n (useless to most apps - can read elswhere). A Chapter on Tiles. Overall 2nd ed. (if) should have more structure in mind / more tables and code and less novel-like paragraphs. Much more on tags and displaying beans. I got this with Jakata Struts Pocket Reference and they complement very well, Pocket reference being outstanding for the tag lib. For US-15 its ok value.
Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners but full of mistakes 2.5/5
Review: I found this book very useful to take me from total novice to - one month experience. After this the book is not a lot of use. I am not here to bag the book but here are the facts. It is riddled with spelling errors, (not that I can spell), grammar, and code errors. Fortumately most of these were obvious but still very annoying. It has a really good step by step section on what happends with a request in struts, which classes and methods are called and how to set up your first app. The best practices stuff is more about personal coding style. There are long chapters on actions and validation, but it falls very far short on struts tags (30/210) pages not nearly enough. Almost nothing on iterating though beans to display data, so critical to most apps. a whole chapter on 18n (useless to most apps - can read elswhere). A Chapter on Tiles. Overall 2nd ed. (if) should have more structure in mind / more tables and code and less novel-like paragraphs. Much more on tags and displaying beans. I got this with Jakata Struts Pocket Reference and they complement very well, Pocket reference being outstanding for the tag lib. For US-15 its ok value.
Rating: 
Summary: This book saved my life
Review: I just don't know what I would've done had I not purchased this book. This book is probably the only one in the market that explains how to do List based form.
Rating:
Summary: It rocks
Review: I must start by disclosing that I was a beta reader for the first three chapters. By beta reader, I mean - I did not know Struts before I started with this book. Beta reader was a concept that the author introduced to me as it differs from a reviewer. Reviewer is one who knows the technology already and is helping to verify if there are errors in the book.
Beta reader is a beginner who is new to the book's theme and reads the book from learning point of view.
My input from a beginner's perspective has gone into shaping the first three chapters. Within reading the first five chapters of this book - 115 pages in total, I knew all the important things in Struts I needed to confidently and successfully develop Struts application. The style of writing is easy read. And you feel that the author is explaining about Struts in person. It goes smoothly without any bumps.
I used the initial five chapters to overcome the learning curve to come up to speed with Struts. After I learnt Struts from the first five chapters, I moved on to read Struts documentation available at the Struts web site. When this book was later completed by the author, I came back and reviewed the rest of the book in another week. Reviewed is a wrong choice of word - Learnt is the right one since from what I found, this book does not repeat any stuff available freely. I learnt Tiles from the Chapter 7 in this book. I also went "Aha" on Chapter 6, 9 and 10 as they revealed some great strategies that are not available anywhere else. I plan to use them right away on the project I am working
Overall this is a great practical book. At $14.95 it rocks!! I would have bought it even if it was $25.00, but I got a free copy as I was a beta reader. The industry really needs this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Have
Review: I read the O'Reilly book first, so I barely even noticed the grammatical errors in this book. This book is straight to the point and tells you exactly what you need to do to get up and running. On top of that, you learn some best practices right off the bat so you end up with a pretty decent framework. The O'Reilly book has you flipping all over the place trying to figure out when Struts starts and stops. Nothing like flipping to Chapter 11 so you can understand the example in Chapter 3. If you're looking for something that gives you the down and dirty to hit the road running, read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good concise book
Review: I recently bought this book after I found a lot of fellow developers using this. The book is crisp and compact and easy to follow. The book gives an in-depth coverage everything from basics to advanced and everything in between. It assumes that you know J2EE and doesnt spend any time there at all. It was good for me. If you want to learn J2EE pick up a book that caters to J2EE. If you are past that and investigating Struts, this book is ideal. I also found 10 complete working exercises downloadable from the publisher's web site, but the book makes no mention of that.
Rating:
Summary: A MUST read for every Struts developer
Review: I started reading the ebook version with some skeptisicm as the book is from a first time Publisher. My view has changed since then remarkably. As I read the ebook, I was impressed by the practical coverage in this book - which also convinced me to buy the printed book. The book has some typos but they are really minor and did not distract me much and neither has prevented me from giving five stars to this book. The book was best value for my money It manages to do justice to Struts and its best practices in a short 225 page and costs just 14.95. The book deserves its subtitle "Basics to Best Practices".
Doesnt matter if you are a beginer or an expert in Struts - You will find this book useful. The book starts off with an excellent introduction to MVC and how Struts fits into MVC. It then explains the basics of Struts very well and develops a hands-on application in Struts. The fun starts from Chapter 4 onwards.
Chapter 4 covers advanced Struts concepts and presents some interesting ideas about Struts Action design. Chapter 6, 9 and 10 were killer stuff. I have three other Struts books with me, yet I found these chapters totally novel concepts found nowhere else. For example, Chapter 6 explained how to modify the Struts BaseTag, CheckboxTag to handle some scenarios where they dont work out-of-the-box. It provided a thorough coverage of Struts Form submissions with Image Buttons. I was doing it wrong all these time!!. Chapter 6 also covered JSTL and how to use Struts-EL. Probably the crown jewel(s) from Chapter 6 are: a) How to handle editable List based Forms
b) How to handle Multi page read only lists (by integrating the popular Pageer Taglib from jsptags.com with Struts)
c) A high-performance page traversal framework mechanism Chapter 7 covers Tiles. Coverage of Tiles elsewhere I read on the net try to cover every feature in Tiles - many of which confuse me. This book sticks to just one way of using Tiles - which I think is the best way to use Tiles. Chapter 9 is about Exception handling with Struts. I have one word to say "Fantastic" !!! The coverage of Exception handling alone is probably worth the price of the book. It provides a solid framework to handle Exceptions in Struts, log them in a centralized manner and report and alert in a production environment. I plan to use this framework AS IS in the project I am currently working on. Most other books on Struts limit their exception chapter to explaining differences between Checked v/s Unchecked exceptions and telling how the <global-exception> tags work in the struts-config.xml. Chapter 10 is for folks who want to customize Struts and reap its benefits in design and development of production systems.
It presents three of four examples of how Struts can be effectively customized.
The best among them was how to how to handle duplicate form submissions in a generic manner. We all have to deal with duplicate form submissions in daily life and handle them on usecase basis by using the Synchronizer tokens. The technique illustrated here no doubt relies on the Sync token but uses it a very ingenious manner, presents a generic Action class. I liked this technique.
Other techniques I liked are that the chapter provides a Dispatch Action like functionality for Image based form submission. The DispatchAction in Struts is great, unfortunately I can use it only under certain restrictions. One of them is that the all of the buttons have to have the same name. This technique removes that restriction and opens a world of possibilities for designing cleaner applications while providing enhanced user experience. If you architect, design and develop Struts based applications for your living, do yourself a favor - Go buy this book. I bet you will not have it in your book shelf but in your hand everyday.
Rating:
Summary: Good quick start book for Struts
Review: I wanted a concise book which will touch all the main aspects of the Struts framework. This book had served that purpose for me. One additional advantage is the proactive replies from the authors while I was going more deeper into the workings of Struts. My favourite chapters are validation, tiles and customizing Struts. Another value proposition of the book is its price. I mention this because, my personal opinion is that a framework should not warrant a lot of investment to learn(this book serves that purpose) and at the same time the investment should reep decent rewards, this book serves that purpose too. Along with the info regarding Struts and its main aspects, the book goes into some tips and tricks to get some complex stuff achieved when implementing a web application. Hats off to the authors for passing on the additional useful info.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, but poor grammar and no helpful index
Review: Struts Survival Guide explains a lot of the Struts platform, and gives many effective code snippets to help guide the learning process. This book is good for someone who is just learning Struts or has previously been exposed to it and wants to learn more about all the bells and whistles. When each concept is introduced it's explained well and then the reason behind why you would or wouldn't want to use the technique is given. That kind of discussion really helps the reader to understand how they might use it in their own application. I have two main issues with the book:
* The first is all the grammar and spelling errors that plague the book. At times it gets distracting and makes the book a bit tough to follow. But this problem may be easily addressed in a future printing the book.
* The second is their index (or lack thereof). While reviewing the book I was working on a Struts project and would often grab the book to understand a new tag or a new concept that I'd never used before, but the index rarely listed the concept I was searching for even though I knew the book covered the topic because I'd read about it previously. For this reason, I believe the book is better read cover to cover and not as a desk reference. But the $15 price and the 224-page length makes buying it for that purpose easy to handle. Lastly, the "Struts-Training" companian workbook offered through the ObjectSource website looks promising (http://www.objectsource.com/). The guide hasn't been completed yet, but seems to offer full-length examples and walk-thrus for each of the topics in the book
Rating:
Summary: Cheap and Short
Review: This book was reccommended to me, as a developer that is new to Java and new to Struts. Since it was cheap and short I figured it was worth trying out. In short, the typos in this book are frankly shocking and made it extremely difficult for me to follow. Typos in his example code sections made them simply inoperable without a thorough investigation. The author should invest in a spell checker.
I did however learn the basics of what the Struts application is all about and if you are after a more high level explanation, then this might be a cheap way of achieving that. Try following his own examples at your own risk though.
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