Professional Java XML Programming with servlets and JSP

Rating:
Summary: An Internet Bubble Product!
Review: An Internet Bubble Product!

If you invested in a DOT COM company in 1999 and you did not sell your stocks on time, you may have lost 99% of your money. If you bought this book (published in 1999), you probably lost all your money, because the book is really, really H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E.

1.The book title is "Professional Java XML Programming with Servlets and JSP" but you will neither learn XML nor Servlets/JSPs. Wrox publication tried to place it in the XML space but there is no so much XML to learn about... The book contains 772 pages but only 185 pages discuss XML. The authors were busy discussing Servlets, JDBC, XSLT XHTML etc... I was looking in the Index section, maybe I could find a good Home Insurance, as well...

2.Strategically, the book discusses two main XML parsers, DOM and SAX. Unfortunately, the authors chose to dedicate a larger portion of their discussion to the SAX parser. Most companies are using the DOM parser because of its extended capabilities, such as the ability to store tag data in a tree structure, provides better searching and better performance. The SAX parser is flat and lacks such capabilities.

The Internet Bubble created an inflation of bad books. I hope that in the future, publishers would put more attention to quality rather than to quantity.

Rating:
Summary: Very Confusing Book
Review: I am a professional programmer with a background in C++ Windows programming who started learning JAVA a year ago. I bought this book with the intention of learning how to leverage XML in JAVA apps and servlets. I made it through the first chapter just fine and then all heck broke loose. I could not get the examples to work, the text became as clear as mud and I had to put the book down in disgust because every other chapter in the book lynchpins on knowledge from the previous one. This would not be a good buy in my humble opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Good concepts Bad Execution
Review: I bought this book on impulse based on the title alone. Unfortunately this was the first book I bought from this particular publisher. God, I hope the others are not this badly organized.

As a professional Java programmer who has used all of the tachnologies in this book, I find that there are some good concepts here in terms of high-level OO design. Unfortunately, the organization of the book requires you to read through a lot of superfluous verbiage to get to the meat.

The criticisms mentioned in other reviews are valid and I won't repeat them here, except to reiterate that the author's academic roots do shine through on this book. The tone is written as if you were sitting in a lecture hall with all the time in world to discuss these concepts and the code examples are not written for performance or high volume traffic on a web site. As a Java professional who writes almost exclusively on the server-side, I found this iritating. There isn't enough time to wade through this book to get what you need when a project is due.

Rating:
Summary: Not practical
Review: I love the idea of this book. Show the evolution of a framework and show an increasingly complex system evolve. Give the user the code and let them work along.

But the execution of the concept is terrible. I have had to tinker with even the examples from chapters 2 and 3 to get them to run at all. I'll admit that the authors picked a daunting task. Just getting the Servlet engine, JSP engine, the personal web server and the ODBC database connections would stop most readers cold. After stuggling with that, I had little patience to debug their code. The Wrox site tells you to see "the errata", but I can't find this.

And one thing I'm still struggling to learn or even find out if it exists - decent debugging tools and techniques for Servlets. I feel like I'm back in the 70's, what with my command line and worrying about environment space and variables. God but I wish I could step through this code rather than sprinkle it with the author's own "Logger" statements.

Rating:
Summary: not for novice
Review: I love this book but obviously it is not for novice.

Rating:
Summary: Certainly not for professional developers!
Review: I think this isn't a very good obok. First, it's not written in a very clear way, I simply didn't understand everything in the book. However, the biggest reason not to buy this book, YOU HAVE TO READ ALL/MOST OF THE CHAPTERS TO UNDERSTAND PARTS. Why is that bad? Many people, including me, like to read only relevant chapters. For example, if you already know some of the stuff, you skip directly to the right chapter and read from there. You can't really do it here, since the authors create lots of classes they constantly use in later chapters. Thus, it makes the book terribly inconvenient. Maybe this is only my impression, I didn't read all of the book, but after a few chapters that I found myself reading stuff I *DIDN'T WANT TO READ*, I just abandoned this book and moved to another one.

Rating:
Summary: No nonsense for the seasoned developer
Review: This book is outstanding. It is an extremely relevant and informative guide to some of the most current technologies that I am interested in.

The audience for this book is well - targeted. This is not a book for beginning java programmers. This is a book for professionals who have invested a substantial amount of time not only in Java, but in the more core studies of Computer Science.

The first several chapters concentrate on building a base of understanding for the rest of the book. The drive to develop n-tier applications is discussed with a detailed focus on the classic three - tier architecture. The shortcomings of common implementations are outlined, and the authors clearly define the source of the problem ... a lack of flexibility in design and implementation. The solution? Could it be XML? Well, XML and various supporting technologies (thus the title of the book).

Before delving into the world of the web, the authors take a chapter to fully explain the concepts of languages, grammars and parsing. This chapter could be skipped, but it could help prevent future design disasters that are so commonly associated with a lack of understanding of formal cfg and csg rules.

Four chapters are dedicated to the introduction and explanation of XML. These chapters outline the components of XML in a slightly odd order, but contain information essential to the understanding of the later chapters in the book.

The authors create a 'mini-language' as an example in one chapter, and I was not very impressed or interested in it, and found it to be of little value, other than to provide exercise using the XML concepts that had already been presented.

There is an appendix that summarizes the syntax of JSP, and I thought that the inclusion of the JSDK, JavaMail and JAF api's was a good thing, primarily because they are extension packages, but I didn't really see the need for the JDBC api to be included.

The remainder of the book is excellent, the JSP chapter is devoid of XML except to mention that JSP 1.x - compliant processors are required to accept JSP pages in XML syntax. This chapter was of more value to me than several tutorials, and entire books on JSP that I have read.

Using the code examples is a snap, assuming you are already familiar with basic java concepts, There is a detailed appendix on HTTP headers, and server response codes, which is helpful to know when just starting to program server-based applications.

For those who prefer to see the application of the technology, Chapter 11 and 12 outline a complete application that incorporates JSP, JavaMail and XML (with a few other resources).

To wrap it up, Chapter 13 covers XSLT and XPath, these are evolving technologies which are extremely powerful, and they are not even fully developed yet! This chapter uses the XML capabilities of IE5, and you should have it installed on the system you use to test their examples. The examples in this chapter are some of the most advanced and well laid out that i have seen. They even present a solution to the classic 8 Queens puzzle using only XSL, although they do warn us that this is an example of what not to do with XSLT, it is a great illustration of what can be done with it.

Again and again, the authors return to the architectural concept of using XML as a means of extending the flexibility of an application. This is a forward-looking book. That is to say that the authors are not afraid to envision the future use, applications, and capabilities that XML appears to be driving towards.

I would recommend this book for developers who are starting to develop distributed systems, up to those who have extensive experience with distributed applications and want to learn about XML as a tool for making more flexible distributed systems.

This book will be on my desk, within easy reach, for a long time...it should be on yours as well.

Rating:
Summary: Very misleading and confusing book
Review: This is a very misleading and confusing book about XML. I would have given this book "0" stars.