Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book with thorough coverage...
Review: This is by far the best book I have ever read about servlets and jsps. I have several books on the subject, and this is the first one that explains the subject matter in a logical, understandable way. The authors do an excellent job of covering all the material needed to understand and use the material in real world development.
The book is organized in a logical and well thought out manner. Each chapter builds on the chapters that precede it, and the last chapter, Building a Complete Web Application, is the best idea I've seen in a long time, integrating information from all the preceding chapters into a project that is practical and usable in the real world with some minor modifications.
The code examples are functional, and the ones that do contain errors, which are not many, are well documented in the errata portion of the book's supporting website, which is a good resource for the book.Without a doubt the best book on the subject I have.
Rating: 
Summary: What to use for Web Development?
Review: To build a web application that generates dynamic web pages leads you immediately to a crossroads. Do you stick to the old, original CGI, or do you use a newer, more powerful language? Of the latter, you might choose PHP, Perl or JSP/servlets. These are all free. But the book's authors argue strongly that the last choice is the most portable and expressive for large scale web applications, because it is used at the heart of J2EE for such problems. Experienced developers of PHP or Perl might reply that their languages are just as powerful for handling web apps. Indeed, a computer science theorist might say that if PHP and Perl are Turing complete (as I think they are), then they can certainly express anything JSP/servlets can, so what is the issue? To answer this, you can regard the book as written on two levels. The most immediate is when it offers a detailed exposition of the properties of JSP/servlets. But at a deeper level, it offers a rebuttal to the other languages, or indeed also to Microsoft's offering. In essence, by being an extension of java, JSP/servlets give you a programming language that is fully object oriented, which makes coding more robust and scalable. You also get the java built in security and exception handling. Plus all the internationalisation. By contrast, take Perl, for example. Very powerful at parsing, and incredibly compact notation. But the latter makes for harder debugging. And it is not very object oriented, so writing large code bodies can get awkward fast. But what about using Microsoft's offering? It really is on a technical par with JSP/servlets for most things. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the latter is simply the zero licensing cost. Followed by the greater mindshare in the marketplace. If you are a web developer and you are not totally committed to your current language, then it behooves you to at least consider the alternative presented in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent tutorial on thin client and JSP/Servlets
Review: Unlike the previous reviewer, I have found this book to be an excellent introduction to and tutorial on the J2EE presentation tier. Although most of my career I have been developing the server side (C++, Java), in tha past I developed rich (using Java Swing) or thin (using Microsoft's Active Server Pages) clients. In other words, major concepts and patterns of client development are not new to me. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed reading this book. Specifically I like this book for the balanced and professional style in which the authors' present its material: they focus not only on the technological aspects of JSP and Servlets, but dedicate considerable amount of material to instill best practices and design patterns. They dedicated an entire chapter to the design patterns, in addition to explaining the best practices (dos and don'ts) in other chapters throughout the book. This should be especially beneficial to novices: unfortunately too many of them learn *only* technological aspects of programming; working on their own, without the guidance of experienced leads or designers, they crank out absolutely horrible and un-maintainable code that becomes a liability to both their employer and customers. The chapters on security, patterns, multi-client support, and ways to manage the web application state all explain and reinforce designs that produce robust and manageable systems that can evolve.
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