Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: I could not put this book down. Don't let the size fool you, this book packs in a lot of information. I've read three Struts books, and this is the book I suggest if you are already familiar with Struts. Learn about all of the new stuff--quickly. Not only can I recomend this book, but I would highly recommend any book Sue Spielman writes. She is a a great technical writer. I wish I could write like her.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Review: I don't understand how some people are saying that this book is confusing. This has been, by far, the most useful book on Struts that I've read. And I've read most of the others. It is completely to the point without all of the boring filler. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is learning, coming up to speed, or doing development on Struts.
Rating: 
Summary: very good resource for someone already familiar with Struts
Review: I found this book's introduction to Struts to be inadequate. I have a very strong understanding of JSP and Servlets and a cursory understanding of the MVC design pattern. After reading the first two chapters I was quite confused about the general workings of Struts. A small, trivial Struts application to introduce the reader to the pieces and how they are inter-related would have increased the understandability ten-fold. However, that might have cut into the author's allowed page count: realize this book is 137 pages soaking wet (including the appendix and index... I don't recommend actually soaking the book). After getting a better understanding of Struts from another source, I came back to learn the details. The author does an good job of explaining how best to use each part of the Struts Framework (that's where the "practical guide" part comes into play). More importantly she notes the possible hang-ups that normally you'd only learn through a bad experience (Don't use instance variables in your Action classes. Don't worry if you forget this rule now -- after you've read the book, this and other gotchas are tattooed inside your head). Overall I'd say this is a very good resource. You'll need to go elsewhere to introduce yourself to Struts (find a nicely explained step-by-step tutorial), but after that, this book will be able to take you most of the way to a well-designed Struts implementation.
Rating: 
Summary: useless
Review: I hate to be a party pooper, but I have to completely disagree with the other rave reviews this book has gotten. I bought the book precisely because of those reviews, and I am badly let down. This book is poorly written and poorly edited. It has only a tiny bit of information in it, and even this is made difficult to find by the authors repeatedly very shallow coverage of all the concepts that she doesn't have space to actually explain. "...outside the scope of this book" The 126 pages are broken into 11 chapters, each of which has an introduction and a summary. Not a whole lot of space is left for actual meaningful contents. The sample application is trivially simple and avoids any of the interesting challenges that would come up in any real application. Even this oversimplified sample is presented in incoherent chunks, where one code snippet has little or nothing to do with the one that follows it. The "Struts Development Cycle" that one reviewer praises is all of a half page long; it is a list that goes from "gather requirements" to "develop application business logic" to "build, test, deploy." Duh. This list is followed up with a few pages of explanation, but each item is given at most a half-page explanation. The list is repeated again in the chapter summary. The "Excellent ready-reference" reviewer gives himself away when he writes "Let one of the other books take the role of reference and tutorial and allow this one to help you out in the pinches." Ah, I see. It's not a reference or a tutorial, it's for... keeping warm when you need extra firewood. The one UML sequence diagram in the book portrays an Error as an Actor. It 'calls' ActionError when 'some error occurred in model.' ActionError calls ActionErrors to 'Add to ActionErrors collection.' This is typical of the book's ability to muddle rather than clarify. Two stars for having chapter 8, which although not great is the one section of the book that has real information. Unfortunately, after reading this book, I still don't know why I should use Struts. The question that the book should have answered first never got answered at all.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh. I read the whole thing and I STILL know nothing
Review: I have been developing web applications and web services on the Tomcat platform for a few years now. I know how to make web applications and how to make them well. However, after hearing all the buz about Struts I went online and read enough about it to get me interested. Unfortunately I bought the wrong book. I have read the entire thing and I am still not one step closer to deploying a Struts-based web application than I was when I first opened the book. It would help if the author built her example from the ground up and showed you each step of the process. This book is no more informative than looking at Comments in the source code.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't do it for me...
Review: I have been programming for around 10 years and have read a lot of technical books. For some reason, I have been unable to understand Struts from this book alone. For reasons of pride, I am blaming the book, not myself :) and will try a different book. I appreciate the attempt to make it short and concise, it's worth a try but at least in my case, it doesn't work as well as a more detailed book with good examples.
Rating:
Summary: Very poor coverage
Review: I really hate to see other readers make the same mistake as I did: being duped by the promised conciseness of the book. Yes, it is short and cheap. But unless all you want is to get a shallow introduction and an unrealistically simple sample to work, the book is a waste. The text is obviously hastely put together. It misses most of the features that are useful for any significant development effort, such as struts application modules and tiles, and its materials are awfully out of date. "Programming Jakarta Struts" by Chuck Cavaness is a much better alternative. Although that book is also kind of lacking in exploring the advanced topics, it at least covers most of the ground and is more up-to-date, which gives the readers a good background from which they can start the exploration themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Very poor coverage
Review: I really hate to see other readers make the same mistake as I did: being duped by the promised conciseness of the book. Yes, it is short and cheap. But unless all you want is to get a shallow introduction and an unrealistically simple sample to work, the book is a waste. The text is obviously hastely put together. It misses most of the features that are useful for any significant development effort, such as struts application modules and tiles, and its materials are awfully out of date. "Programming Jakarta Struts" by Chuck Cavaness is a much better alternative. Although that book is also kind of lacking in exploring the advanced topics, it at least covers most of the ground and is more up-to-date, which gives the readers a good background from which they can start the exploration themselves.
Rating: 
Summary: Look elsewhere
Review: I was unable to learn anything useful from this book. It gives a very broad discription of Struts features without explaining anything in depth. If you want to learn how to use struts, you will be better served if you look elsewhere
Rating:
Summary: Excellent ready-reference
Review: I was very delighted to asked to be a pre-press technical reviewer for this book after having read a number of Sue's other articles (especially those at www.onjava.com) and I am delighted to endorse this book. It is very well paced for those that are working with Struts regularly, as I do, and who need a ready-reference for those times during the day when questions come up. While it would be possible to learn how to program with Struts from just this book, I actually recommend that it be used in conjunction with one of the other fine titles available for Struts programming. Let one of the other books take the role of reference and tutorial and allow this one to help you out in the pinches. This book is the Swiss-Army knife of Struts books, it's usefulness is far greater than it's slim size would suggest.
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