Rating: 
Summary: Great Struts book!
Review: Review
If you are working in the IBM Websphere area for web application development, you will often encounter references to the Struts architecture framework. IBM highly recommends this standard for Java application development for Websphere. And if you want to acquaint yourself with that framework, this is a good book to get you there.
The book starts out with a quick sample application that you can download so that you can see a representative Struts-style application. Most of the details are glossed over, but it's only temporary. It's followed by a chapter that goes into the architecture, explaining how it works and why the pieces fit together. From there, another simple application is developed, this time with more explanation as to what is going on. The rest of the book then goes into each part of the Struts framework, with copious code examples and illustrations.The authors assume a fair amount of previous experience on the part of the reader. The assumption is that there is a familiarity with HTML, JSP syntax, JavaBean conventions, and similar technologies. The reader should also be familiar with URLs, web application archives (WAR files), and other concepts surrounding web application development. By assuming these pre-existing skills, the authors can spend more time and space on Struts information. So if you are just starting out in web application development in Java, you may struggle a bit with this information. The authors also assume the use of Tomcat for the web application server. Since I'm working with IBM's Websphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), I've had to make some mental adjustments on how to get things to work in that environment without the author's direct instruction. Because of this, I'd recommend that you be familiar with WSAD before using this book. The style of the book is very readable, and the concepts are easy to grasp. You may have to read over the material a couple of times to get it, but that's not a fault of the writing. New technology and concepts can be difficult to grasp. Struts is no exception. I can say that I'm understanding the material more quickly than I expected, and that's always a good thing. Conclusion
If you're looking to learn Struts, you would be well-served to get this book and dig in.
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Summary: Excellent Struts Compendium
Review: I first heard about this book on TSS and was one of the first customer receiving it here in germany at around christmas 2002. This book was and is invaluable for my and my co-workers work. Up to now we have order seven of this books. This book can easily act as introduction and reference to struts. Ted Husted gives you an precise idea of the MVC concept and the struts control flow. He describe the multiple "parts" of struts and how they interact with each other. Within the whole book it get's crisp clear what matters within software development and particular web application development: it's about architecture. This book gives you examples of good programming practice with struts and guides you to establish a layered design throughout your application. I have read Programming Jakarta Struts and some german books, but no one has the depth of infomation than "Struts in Action".
If you need an in depth look (and soon or later you need it when working with struts) this one is clearly for you.
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Summary: A great guide to Struts and a fantastic reference.
Review: I purchased this book a while ago and its been my primary source for all Struts related questions. I've purchased other books on Struts, this is by far the best one. It has comprehensive examples and makes a great reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I've been programming with Struts for 2 years now (and Java for 3) and I wish I had had this book when I started. Even though I now know Struts to about the 75% level, thanks greatly to this book which helped me in the upgrade from version 1.0 to 1.1, Struts never ceases to amaze me - what it can do, the work that it can save a web programmer, its robustness and its elegance too. The down-side is of course the steep learning curve, and the sticking points that I still come across where I have programmed or configured something wrong and can't work out why. In both these areas this book is invaluable. In the first case if someone needs to learn Struts, this covers the basics and provides a good grounding, and secondly I found the contents page and the indexing always lead me straight to the point in the text where I need to be when I've just created a bug in my code or I don't know how to approach a problem. Struts in Action is well written with flowing text and clear explanations, even to the point where I sometimes find myself reading the whole chapter after looking up and finding a little snippet of info - you never know what else you might learn.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but Not Great
Review: I've used this book for the last 6 months on my 1st Struts project, and am using it for my 2nd. I've now read it three times. It gets clearer every time, but should I have to read it three times before it makes sense? This can't be your only Struts book. You'll need other references. My biggest complaint is that the examples in the beginning of the book constantly use Struts tag libraries instead of plain HTML that a non-Struts programmer already knows. The problem is that the book doesn't get around to explaining the tag syntax until chapter 10, so I had an awful time trying to understand what the early examples were doing. Hence the necessity to read it multiple times. It didn't help that there are many, many errors in the examples. (If you get this book, go get the errata and pencil them in BEFORE you read it. That will save a lot of head-scratching.) I also think the authors tried to cover too many subjects outside of Struts, such as Tiles and Scaffolds. For a programmer buying this book to learn about Struts, these additional frameworks just add layers of confusion. They would have done much better to stick with pure Struts and Java and leave these Struts "add-ons" to another book. Finally, this book, like almost every programing book on the market, suffers from a lack of drawings. Sometimes a simple drawing showing process or data flow, or even a screen shot of what a rendered jsp page looks like, will save pages of verbage. On a positive note, I really liked the first half of the book where different aproaches were presented along with the pro/con of each. Also, the writing is fairly "friendly", sentances are kept short and to the point and the layout is easy to read.
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Summary: It's a good book...
Review: It's my first book on STRUTS and it needs your patient to follow author's steps, but it works! I actualy learns lots about STRUTS from this book. From this book I see great power behind STRUTS. The drawback of this book is that it cover too many things for a STRUTS beginner.The work of author should be appreciated.
Rating:
Summary: Informative
Review: Although the book has lots of information and has many details, there's really no substitute for actually programming a MVC application with Struts. Struts is simple enough that most of what it offers can be learned by writing applications and looking at the API, which is open-source. The fine grained minutia is not in the book and has to be discovered manually. But, if you own his book, you can just ask Ted!
Also, before embarking on a trip with Struts as the framework, it is vital to understand the MVC pattern. That pattern has its advantages and its disadvantages.
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Summary: Fantastic! Exactly what I need to know about Struts!!
Review: The first Struts book I bought was "The Struts Framework: Practical Guide for Programmers" by Sue Spielman. This book was aboslutely useless. After reading the entire book I was still unable to grasp how Struts worked, and more importantly, how to write my own Struts-based application. "Struts in Action", on the other hand, was exactly what I needed. Struts is explained, part by part, as you go about creating sample applications of increasing complexity. The author tells you exactly how much you need to know at the time, so there is no information overload. Each chapter slowly goes into more detail, and before you know it, you understand how struts works. I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs to create web applications. It also has many notes about Struts 1.1, which most Struts books are too old to mention.
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Summary: EXCELLENT introduction to Struts, MVC, and Layered Design
Review: This book did a great job explaining to me not only *what* Struts is and *why* I should use it but also *how* to use it. This is something I found lacking in the O'Reilly book, Programming Jakarta Struts. In addition to the coverage on Struts, this book extends into areas like proper MVC and Layered design principles that are very important to apply if you wish to get the most out of the Struts framework. Of course a full treatment of MVC, layered design and other enterprise web engineering best practices are outside of the scope of this book but the authors have plenty of references so you can fill in gaps in your knowledge as necessary. I have read many technical books, and few were as well thought-out and thorough as this one. If you are using Struts, this is the book to buy!
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Summary: Solid Book by Experienced Developers
Review: After wadding through a few on-line examples and having dealt with another struts book which I found to be poorly organized, I recently turned to Eclipse in Action. This is the book for me! I found it to be tight enough on information that you don't fall asleep as you work your way through book, but also well organizd enough to be useful. It contains some surprisingly dense sections masquerading as a long series of small examples. The tiles chapter comes to mind as a good example. In what appears to be an idiots guide to converting a non-tiles page to tiles page he manages to visit several possible patterns for using JSPs and struts from no-struts at all to subclassed definitions in the tiles.xml, stopping along the way and "spoon-feeding" the difference between all of the confusingly similar tiles tags. Such apparently simplistic lines such as "rename the <tiles:insert> to <tiles:put> elements" serves the beginner, but also serves as well as any bullet list of differences for the more experienced developer. This is particularly the case, when you are looking in your books to help you debug an apparently valid, but non-functional use of something obscure like a tiles tags which you pasted but forgot to change, or in which you accidently used the wrong attribute. Reading this book, you could tell that the authors were very familiar with the material enough to discuss various choices, providing useful explanation for their particular designs. They also, did not bother to list ever possible choice and XML attribute choosing instead to explain how to use the important bits and assuming you can use the terse on-line documentation yourself for other more obscure bits. Despite the fact that in one chapter I realized I was reading something by one of the co-authors, because it was sufficiently different than the other chapters, I think some credit is due the editors at Manning. Recently they seem to have produced, not the thickest books on a subject, nor the most encyclopedic or pedantic, but certainly well organized and very readable and thus very useful books. Overall, I recommend this book for general learning and reference. Sure I might suggest you wade through the shorter but much less readable O'Reilly book, if you really find some compelling need to write your own RequestProcessor, but if you want to learn how to use Struts as it was intended from some of the folks who have been using it, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Struts In Action.
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