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Rating: 
Summary: Starts out good but code is buggy!
Review: Hi:THe book looks good and has helped to get me going. The book will go off in directions in a haphazard way that reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer is trying to repair his basement by watching a video. The BIG problem with this book is that the code has errors in it that keep it from working!! This to me is a big NO NO and the reason I gave the book a low rating. Sometimes the errors can be fixed by adding an import statement here and there but othertimes it seems to be a question of coding logic. Now I have not time to debug their code so I skip it, but it would be nice to see it work... On top of all that there is NO support for the book by the author or the publisher. This is strange considering other titles offer great suppor that usually rival software manufacturers support for their own product!
Rating: 
Summary: For a 24-hour series, it is a darn good book!
Review: I am prejudiced against books that have 24-hours or 21-days in their title. They usually are like a sloppy sandwitch that your 2-year-old will put together in 2 min! This book is different. I have to agree with previous reviews - setting up Tomcat is never trivial. it took me a long time to get used to the vagaries of Tomcat. No book can document the Tomcat fully since by the time the book is out in the market, the Tomcat version has changed beyond recognition!! I have long since given up trying to look for a book to tell me how to set up Tomcat. Use of the web resources instead is very effective for this purpose. Beyond that, this book packs the most effective set of JSP programming tutorial. The topic is huge - please check out some of the Wrox Publ books! But the author does a good job of presenting 60-70% of all that info in not-so-confusing easy-to-work-with examples. There are some code snafus but these are trivial; hey, I am yet to buy a book without code mistakes. If you really are serious about getting a good jump start on Java Server Pages, this book is a great springboard. You do need to graduate to a "Professional JSP" book right after that for some production level work. I still consult this book when I need to brush up on some basics. Neglect the "24 hour" phrase, and you have yourself a decent JSP book.
Rating: 
Summary: Disgusting!!!!
Review: I do not have enough bad things to say about this book. The part that is most ambiguous is in trying to set up WebLogic. The two authors, being from BEA, should have been a little more detailed in their explanations. If you are new to Tomcat and WLS, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: Disgusting!!!!
Review: I do not have enough bad things to say about this book. The part that is most ambiguous is in trying to set up WebLogic. The two authors, being from BEA, should have been a little more detailed in their explanations. If you are new to Tomcat and WLS, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: Do-it-yourself Manual
Review: I have 2 major complaints about this book and the software that comes with it. The first is that setting up Apache's Tomcat is not exactly intuitive, and there is almost no help in the book itself. It casually mentions editing a batch file here and there without any specifics. As far as setting up a JDBC driver, youre pretty much on your own. My other complaint is that some of the code itself is buggy. The author(s) takes a meandering journey throughout this book, as if ideas were just coming to him randomly. The book does little good for a beginner because of its lack of info on getting the software that is bundled with it working properly.
Rating:
Summary: Badly organized and badly edited
Review: I would not buy this book again. There are a number of problems with this book. As other reviews have noted, it doesn't give much, if any, help in setting up either Tomcat or BEA's WebLogic server, which comes on the CD. Tomcat isn't surprising, as both of the authors work for BEA, but the lack of information about WLS is. The book is badly organized. First of all, it's full of forward references, presenting topics in small bits without much explanation, then saying "We'll cover that later". It also has multiple dislocations; for example they cover "Arrays and Collections" in Chapter 7, then have a sidebar on "Arrays" in Chapter 9. The book is also badly edited, with numerous errors, particularly in the code examples, which make them hard to work out. The index is severely lacking; for example Listing 8.3 uses a "page import" command which was briefly covered in Chapter 6, but there is no reference for this in the index. Finally, all of the examples in Chapter 8 do not work correctly as listed; they require special setup of the server and no explanation is given on how to do this. Overall you will be happier with some other book. I dumped this and went to the O'Reilly "JavaServer Pages" book which so far is much superior.
Rating: 
Summary: Adequate but not exceptional.
Review: In the arena of dynamic web content generated on a server, the world seems to be moving towards the two technologies of active server pages (ASPs) and Java Server Pages (JSPs). I have recently seen an increase in the interest in JSPs, so I began developing a course. I started that process by reading this book and performing most of the exercises. I found the sections on using JSPs to be very straightforward, the examples were easy to understand and implement. After completion of the book, I was able to move on and write my own material for the course.
One problem that I had at the start was when I tried to use this book as my resource to get the Tomcat server running on my machine. The amount of information in the book is inadequate for that task, although I was able to get Tomcat running after examining the Tomcat documentation. A second criticism is more serious. While it is a slow transition, the world is moving towards the use of XHTML. Therefore, in my opinion it is time that technical books start using it rather than the old sloppy HTML. There really should be no place for doing things like not having a closing paragraph tag associated with all opening paragraph tags.
The book is an adequate to good introduction to JSPs and if you are a beginner, it will get you started in an easy manner. Advanced users should look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Please don't waste your money here!!!
Review: This book amazed when I first sat down to read it.
After encountering the first few errors, I decided to write them all down.
- After reaching the 15th error after about 40 pages, it was
just too much!
- The authors don't even provide you with code samples that work!
- They don't go into any level of depth when explaining
something (I know this is a beginners book, but at least don't
write something that is not true, just because you assume your
reader are not JSP/Java experts).
- I wouldn't dare charge more than $10 for such a low-quality
work.
Rating:
Summary: Please don't waste your money here!!!
Review: This book amazed when I first sat down to read it.
After encountering the first few errors, I decided to write them all down.
- After reaching the 15th error after about 40 pages, it was
just too much!
- The authors don't even provide you with code samples that work!
- They don't go into any level of depth when explaining
something (I know this is a beginners book, but at least don't
write something that is not true, just because you assume your
reader are not JSP/Java experts).
- I wouldn't dare charge more than $10 for such a low-quality
work.
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