Rating: 
Summary: Money down the tubes!
Review: The sample code is incomplete and scattered all throughout the book, and half of the code you need to create the sample application is not discussed in the book. Give this one a pass and buy a different book.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of trees
Review: I was quite happy when I received this book but it turned out to be a waste of money as the examples are written in such scatterbrain fashion, the index is an example of corrupt laziness, and the introduction is a schizophrenic mess to get you even more confused. What's worse is that parts of this were written during a transition period between 1.0 and 1.1 struts so you're not getting a full picture of how struts really works. What's needed are good, fully developed examples of code since the API and documentation on the struts website lack such things. Instead, you get a half-assed section on taglibs which only are clips of what's needed to really get newbies started. I suppose if you want a "high level" introduction to the basic theory behind struts, this is okay. But for anything sophisticated, add a few more bucks and buy something with better developed examples.
Rating: 
Summary: Average presentation but Good coverage
Review: This book was disappointing to me.It aspired to cover the Struts framework with a great level of detail. But it lacked clarity in presentation. It was constantly flitting between topics. The same material is covered in an overview and in-depth mode. The book was not readable. <b>Buy the book</b> if
you want an indepth coverage of every struts topic. <b>Dont buy this book </b> if you want a good tutorial on struts. It will take forever to start writing struts applications. You need to read the whole book and summarize its content to yourself before you can start writing struts apps.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great tutorial guide to Struts
Review: Programming Jakarta Struts is a great book. I wanted to give it 4 1/2 stars but Amazon doesn't allow that. I bought this book the first day it came out and read it cover to cover. This was one of the first books out that covered Struts 1.1 in any detail. Chuck Cavaness, the author had published most of the book on TheServerSide.com where readers could review the beta copy of the book and so I knew this was going to be a great book. I just finished teaching a 6-week Struts class and used this book for that class. The book starts with intro to Web development, servlets and JSP pages before jumping into the basics of the Struts framework. Chuck does a great job in breaking down the components of the Struts framework and explaining them in details. After the intro, the book builds into the guts of the Struts framework with detailed chapters exploring MVC, the Action classes, Model components and the display tier. The chapter on tag libraries is very well written. The author mentions JSTL, the JSP Standard Tag Library but only includes a 2-page summary of JSTL. I wish the section on JSTL had a little more meat to it. I think this probably had something to do with the timing of the publication of the book and the JSTL standard. I also liked the chapter on the validation framework. With the framework wasn't covered in any detail, there was still enough information to get you started with the validation framework. In the later chapters, the author discusses EJB integration in Struts and provides some good best practices for that integration. To summarize, this is a great book and has to be one of the best Struts tutorial books out there. I should know, as I own about five Struts book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about Struts.
Rating:
Summary: Struts, smuts
Review: Book is kind of simplistic, but it reflects an 'API' that is overly complicated for what it does. Abstraction is a good thing - as long as it conceptually simplifies an interface. Struts is abstraction for the sake of abstraction. It is a complex abstraction over a set of complex APIs. It seems to me that the designers of Structs just wanted to write an abstraction layer for the sake of writing one. There are lots of complicated things that I normally program that Structs can't even begin to do. And, all the objects that Structs creates makes it perform slowly.
Rating:
Summary: Should be called "Struts for Dummies"
Review: I bought this book without really looking at the content because all my other O'Reilly books are the best on their subject. That was a mistake - O'Reilly have really dropped the ball on this one. Here's some non-trivial stuff the book didn't cover:
1. A reference for the Struts tag library ("Go read the docs" it says)
2. How should my Action handle a "Cancel" button on a form?
3. How do I get the properties file to be reloaded without restarting the servlet container?
4. Does the javascript date validation work properly? It doesn't seem to handle "dd-MMM-yy" format.... I think the author should have spent more time reading over the Struts mailing list to figure out what people really cared about. O'Reilly are at their best with books aimed at people who can read the online docs but want more. Unfortunately a better name for this book would be "Programming Jakarta Struts for People Who Have Never Used Struts and Don't Know Too Much About JSPs".
Rating:
Summary: not well-organized
Review: It looks nice in the table of contents. After reading it, its getting more and more confusing. The codes mix with Struts APIs and their own framework. Unless you are very familiar with the APIs, you end up checking the online documents and see whether this line of code belongs to Struts or the author's oreilly package. Sometimes I need to flip back and forth for hundreds of pages to find the detail. For example, the LoginAction class appears in page 116, but it does not explain its base class (which is also from author's own framework) until page 228.
This book does cover a lot of important things about Struts, but I wish it could be more organized like other O'Reilly books.
Rating: 
Summary: Great practical book about Struts
Review: Absolutely great practical book about Struts 1.1.
I can see it used as a tutorial as well as a reference. Easy to read and well-organized. Includes very useful diagrams and clarifications. Covers some of the evolvement of Struts 1.0 into 1.1.
Warning: this is not a J2EE book. I would strongly suggest getting acquainted with servlets and JSP beforehand.
This is not a book about software architecture either. In fact, most of the design questions covered are lacking depth if not directly related to Struts.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This book just seemed to make more sense to me than so many of the others.
Rating:
Summary: Great for experienced Java coders
Review: This is a very good book for experienced Java developers. If you are looking though, for an intro text, this is not it. This is for serious programmers.
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