Rating: 
Summary: One of the Best Book About Struts
Review: I have read a couple of good books about Struts and by far, this book stands out as my favorite. The author of this book connects to the reader and takes the reader step by step in details of what Struts is all about and what one should know about it. However, what makes this book really stand out is the language that the author uses to convey his information: a modest and simple language and at the same time very effective and professional. One picks this book up to learn about Struts and finds he is learning a lot more than Struts. After reading this book, I thought the best way to return to him is to write a review and give him a five star. I thank him for writing a book like this and ask him to keep on writing more books.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good for moderately experienced web developer
Review: I have been developing Struts 1.0 based application for almost 2 years and now I started working on applications using Struts 1.1. Consequently, I have fairly acquianted with web application development problems and common pitfalls. I started reading this book for learning new features and immediately started appreciating the author's domain and technical knowledge.
The book does not only explains Struts 1.1 at great detail, but also suggests how and when to apply a particular technique to solve a specific problem. IMHO, unless one has faced such real world problem or can imagine such scenario, it is difficult to appreciate the book's coverage. For e.g., in the Chapter 5, the author explained how to use Prebuilt Struts Action and when to use them. Such real world tips are scattered throughout the book.
Any book which covers such framework, assumes the developers knowledge of the domain, which the framework is built to address. If the person reading the book is not well familiar with the domain, then it may be difficult for him to appreciate the books coverage or author's writing skill. I think the same is true for this book too. Overall I found it very useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but could have been better
Review: This is my second Struts book, Wiley's book is was the first. And this is by far much better in explaining Struts than the first. My only disappointment of the book is the lack of one more chapter that could have went through the process of building the Store front app. Thats what next for me to do, I dont think it will take much to set it up, but doubt it if some one not done any struts before. So there is the reason for 3 stars. But I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Struts, although I doubt they would be able to write anything without a mentor.
Rating: 
Summary: horrible book
Review: This book gets lost in the details of its example application which is not very good. They should have picked a different example. I think there are much better books out there than this one which cover struts in a much better fashion. I don't know why this one is so popular. I would recommend you browse some of the other struts books out there and not buy this one.
Rating:
Summary: O'Reilly's Quality is Sinking
Review: I've been using O'Reilly books since I started programming 15 years ago. They used to be by far the best unix books in the industry. In the last few years I've seen the quality sink to the same level as the other mainstream tech books. If they get any worse, they'll be down there with MSFT Press. Yikes!
This book is horrible. Full of vague generalizations instead of concrete statements and examples. A 2nd edition is out but I wouldn't touch it.
Rating:
Summary: Solid overview at the right level of depth
Review: What I appreciated about this book is the breadth of the coverage is at a consistent well thought out level throughout. The authors never rat hole, and they cover all of the topics for a Struts installation from installation and setup in the first chapters, through the view and model structures in the stand out fifth and sixth chapters, to topics such as validation, internationalization and EJB access in the later chapters.
Definitely a useful resource for anyone using, or evaluating, the Struts framework.
Rating:
Summary: Move to Struts 1.1
Review: [A review of the Second Edition]The first version of Struts was enthusiastically received by the Java community. Its easy factorisation of GUI coding and back end business logic, in a fashion that built upon existing Model-View-Controller approaches, proved compelling. So too, of course, was its free, open source nature. As experience was gained, Struts was upgraded to version 1.1, which this book fully discusses, in the typical competent O'Reilly tradition that readers will be familiar with. If you are still using Struts 1.0, and have no inclination to migrate, then you probably don't need this book. But Cavaness suggests that you should give 1.1 a consideration, and this book is persuasive argument. Some chapters are useful, but mundane, like those on internationalisation, exception handling and logging. Definitely important capabilities. So much so that you can reasonably expect any major application to have these. The only question is, how exactly does it enable them? Struts handles these quite capably. I have not read the first edition of this book. But this edition indeed seems very comprehensive and useful.
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