Rating: 
Summary: Tomcat - not yet a Definitive Guide
Review: This is not yet one of those really "Definitive Guides" as O'Reilly has published so many in the past, and that so far have always helped me out. For a relatively unexperienced Web app developer like me, too many topics are left untouched.
For instance, not a word on the many class loaders used by Tomcat, of which the one used for applications is named WebappClassLoader - my initial lack of understanding of this Tomcat idiosyncrasy has caused me a lot of trouble in the past, and this book would not have helped me.
I'm also missing the expected good advice on how to use the various directories in the Tomcat tree (common, shared) for storing common jar files.
The several ways in which a web application can be configured (with or without web.xml, with or without mapping) are described, but how a full URL will look like in each variation is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have just started to scratch the surface of development with Tomcat, and no doubt I will later on find much of value in this book, but so far I am not impressed.
Rating: 
Summary: A Must-Have
Review: Tomcat The Definitive Guide is absolutely a must have for anyone setting up Tomcat. I have a Mac OS X machine and the directions in the book were perfectly clear as to how to setup, auto-start when rebooting, and a huge number of other points. What I love about this book and in general all of the O'Reilly books is their ability to cover the issues completely without too much explanation or too little. This book always points you to where you can get more information. It's also got a great discuss on whether to integrate Apache with Tomcat or just run Tomcat. I changed the way I had it configured after reading their very thoughtful discussion.This book is excellent as a reference for JSP developers as well (of course if you are doing JSP under Tomcat). It doesn't teach you how to do JSP. It does give you a good background for how your JSP pages are executed and how Tomcat reacts to requests.
Rating:
Summary: THE Tomcat Bible - A must own book for anyone using Tomcat
Review: Tomcat: The Definitive Guide is a great book about the most commonly used open-source servlet/JSP container. Tomcat is the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Tomcat is really powerful and flexible, but you really need a good book to figure out how to integrate Tomcat with Apache, how to set load-balancers, clustering, etc on all of the major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X. This is where Tomcat: The Definitive Guide comes in. This really well written book makes it easy to follow for the developer as well as non-developer admin. The book starts with an introduction of Tomcat (v4.0) where you learn how to stop/start the server, learn about the directory structure, and learn to modify the start/stop scripts as well as the configuration settings. I really like the treatment given to security, realms and JAAS in the second chapter with more details in the sixth chapter. Most books of this type will leave out security and this book deals with it in the second chapter. Kudos to the authors for that. I also really like the chapter on performance tuning that deals with real-world applications. The chapter on integration with the Apache webserver is really well written. Most people that deploy Tomcat in production will want to put Apache webserver in front of Tomcat to serve up static content like html and images while letting Tomcat handle servlets and JSPs. Most of the documentation about this Apache httpd - Tomcat integration on the Internet deals with v1.3 of Apache httpd. However, the book deals with Apache 2.0, which is another plus for the book. I can go on and on - If you are using Tomcat, planning on using Tomcat or just want to learn more about the server, this book will provide you with all of the information to help harness Tomcat's power and wealth of features. I would highly recommend this book as a companion to any servlet/JSP programming book.
Rating:
Summary: THE Tomcat Bible - A must own book for anyone using Tomcat
Review: Tomcat: The Definitive Guide is a great book about the most commonly used open-source servlet/JSP container. Tomcat is the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Tomcat is really powerful and flexible, but you really need a good book to figure out how to integrate Tomcat with Apache, how to set load-balancers, clustering, etc on all of the major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X. This is where Tomcat: The Definitive Guide comes in. This really well written book makes it easy to follow for the developer as well as non-developer admin. The book starts with an introduction of Tomcat (v4.0) where you learn how to stop/start the server, learn about the directory structure, and learn to modify the start/stop scripts as well as the configuration settings. I really like the treatment given to security, realms and JAAS in the second chapter with more details in the sixth chapter. Most books of this type will leave out security and this book deals with it in the second chapter. Kudos to the authors for that. I also really like the chapter on performance tuning that deals with real-world applications. The chapter on integration with the Apache webserver is really well written. Most people that deploy Tomcat in production will want to put Apache webserver in front of Tomcat to serve up static content like html and images while letting Tomcat handle servlets and JSPs. Most of the documentation about this Apache httpd - Tomcat integration on the Internet deals with v1.3 of Apache httpd. However, the book deals with Apache 2.0, which is another plus for the book. I can go on and on - If you are using Tomcat, planning on using Tomcat or just want to learn more about the server, this book will provide you with all of the information to help harness Tomcat's power and wealth of features. I would highly recommend this book as a companion to any servlet/JSP programming book.
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