Rating: 
Summary: Not worth it
Review: Listen to the other reviews. This book is just an encyclopedia of waste. At least an encyclopedia has pictures and examples; this book has neither. After the first 2 chapters, it's all downhill. It is a very frustrating read because there are absolutely no examples. It's all theory. Don't waste your money and don't listen to all the fancy quotes on the book's back cover. This book just doesn't cut it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Gem of a Technology Book
Review: I read this book cover to cover and found it to be the best book written on the Struts MVC framework by far. Ted Husted obviously knows Struts in and out and isn't afraid to share his knowledge. By reading this book you will learn Struts, how it works, how it is configured, and how to build web applications that leverage its capabilities. You will also find invaluable implementation strategies, Struts 1.0 to 1.1 migration techniques, design patterns, and integration strategies with several important Jakarta Commons packages. In short, if you want to learn to implement world-class Struts applications and gain invaluable insight into Struts that clearly represents years of real-world experience, then this book is definitely for you.
Rating:
Summary: Not Believing the Recent Reviews
Review: I am not sure if the most recent reviewers read the same book that I read. Struts in Action provides the gamut of simple to detailed information about the Struts framework. Additionally, the goal of the book is not to provide complete examples but to use pieces of code to actually show examples of the information that Mr. Husted is conveying. There comes a point where being spoon fed is something different than learning.For those who need a complete application for an example might I suggest "Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Object Relational Bridge, Lucene, and Velocity". That book builds a complete web app as its premise. Again, the goal in Struts in Action is to provide the details of how to approach the MVC way of doing things using Jakarta Struts. The use of additional toolsets like Scaffold comes from the experience of the author (as evidenced by stuff in the Struts mailing lists and Resources page). I keep going back to this book over all the other Struts books simply because it provides information and examples of details that I am trying to figure out while building apps. As with all things in the open source world things change and fluidity is a beautiful thing. To refute one reviewer in particular I must point out that when this book was published Hibernate was not industrial strength code. I am using Hibernate now on some apps but don't blame Ted for not giving every solution to every problem...
Rating: 
Summary: Aggravating
Review: The first part of this book started off pretty good. I was able to do and understand the simple login application. After that, it made me feel pretty stupid. I completely lost focus due to lack of examples and the ever compounding lecture on tough topics. When it came to the final Artimus application, which is basically a huge conglomeration of just about every possible thing you can do, I was completely lost and couldn't get it working with WSAD. I gave up, i'm getting a different book.
Rating:
Summary: Dont buy this book
Review: This is not a good written book. It looks like that the information is gathered from various sources and put together without explaining the important details. It tells an overview of the struts but fails to explain how and why. Even the elements of struts-config.xml are not explained in thorough detail and how they are related to each other. I would not recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Total Disappointment
Review: Though the book does cover the basics, it failed to be clear and concreate, when it gets into details. There is a huge gap between the "Simple Application" of Ch.3 and the "Artimus Application" of Ch. 15. And these are the only two examples in the entire book. Infact to add more to the confusion, the authors started referring to "Artimus" in bit and pieces in the earlier chapters themselves. While the reader doesn't have any idea at all. There is no simple example, which explains the use of a Database. Rather the authors resorted to the so called "Commercial-grade application, The Artimus". Well it may be of commercial-grade, but doesn't help the developer to start quick. And best of all, it uses Scaffold tool set, which you can find, no where else other than the authors' website. In the Jakarta site, it is yet to be released and right now in "Sandbox (Not-Yet-Proposed) Components " category. God knows what the authors' had in mind. Looks like they wanted to emphasise more on there own tool sets (like scaffold) than struts actually. Rather it would have been much better, if they have used quite matured DAO like Hibernate, etc. Hope they come out with better examples with more clear explanations in the next edition of the book.
Rating:
Summary: just as average as other references out there...
Review: during the course of my work, i had to rewrite a monolithic servlet-based web application and decided to use a model 2 mvc architecture for the new design. figuring that it would be quicker to use an existing framework than design and build my own, i decided to use struts based on the quantity of favorable statements i found on the internet. i was (and am) _very_ disappointed with this book. the book starts off with a nice high-level overview of the framework, but then fails thereafter with respect to mostly everything--from explaining the syntactical nuances, components, absurd case-modification of uri's and virtual references to resources, etc., etc., etc... during the course of roughly 3 weeks working with the framework, i have now made some reasonable progress, no thanks to the book, but _merely_ to brute force (time-consuming) trial and error. being a substantial-sized book i expected a thorough treatment of the important details such as mappings (critically bad explanations), errors (makes it sound easier and more trivial than it turns out to be--in fact, i still haven't gotten errors to work properly), and the massive configuration file to name a few. many of the code snippets and examples fail to provide a context from which to digest them properly leading to more confusion and frustration. considering that husted has apparently worked on the framework itself (though the team is actually led by mcclanahan), i am surprised and disappointed at his inability to explain the framework which he has allegedly helped develop. in addition, shame of craig mcclanahan for not reading this book (and making them rewrite it) and lending his name to it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good start, bad finish, mediocre middle
Review: I very much enjoyed the first eight chapters of this book with the first four being the meat of what Struts is all about. The remainder, however, seemed a bit disjointed and haphazardly put together. My biggest criticism of this book is the 18 pages of errata available on-line which itself has some errata. I would have expected a more polished tome of this detail and length.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book to learn about struts
Review: This book will definitely help you get started building Struts applications. It goes into great detail when explaining the config files and each of the struts components. It also gives good design approaches to help you create a good Struts app.
It doesn't give you that many examples about the tag libraries but this book isn't about tag libraries. I will definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn and build Struts applications.
Rating:
Summary: THE Authority on Struts
Review: A great read, cover-to-cover. Detailed, well-explained examples outlining every why, what, and how of struts and web app architecture in general. In depth coverage of new Struts 1.1 features including Tiles, Validator, Scaffolding, and Velocity templates that you won't find in other books (as of this writing). Chapter 15 is the climax of the book, pulling everything together in one comprehensive example.
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