Apache Jakarta-Tomcat

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Summary: Apache Jakarta-Tomcat
Review: Good in the sense that it is compact and offers a high-level overview of JSP and Servlets-but not enough examples to allow you to design professional apps. This is not a good book for a detailed description of how to configure Tomcat.

Rating:
Summary: Not true to the title, but not totally worthless
Review: I've been using Tomcat for about six months. I've been figuring it out little by little with the use of the online material which IMHO is lacking. I was hoping to get a good book to explain the information not easily learned through the product doucmentation.

Instead of a Tomcat focused book, I got a decent JSP and Servlet overview, coverage of web site configuration, descriptions of different Tomcat features and then short chapters covering Apache Struts, Log4J, and SOAP.

Not what I bargained for, but not a useless resource either.

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Summary: Good lord! one of the WORST books out there!
Review: I've read a quite a few technical books and by far, this one tops the list as being THE worst book I've ever read. Too much information missing, makes many assumptions that you know what you're doing. (If I knew what I was doing with Tomcat, why would I need the book?) Unbelievable. HORRIBLE is a word that comes to mind (among many others that would be "bleeped" off of here.)

Rating:
Summary: Goodfun
Review: Imagine action films were 30 minutes long. There would be no time for sub-plots or romantic involvements or "No! You go on without me ...". All there would be is car chases and explosions. Godwill's book is rather like that.

I liked it.

Forget the measured blend of theory, fact and example which is the style of O'Reilly's authors. This book cuts to the chase, and it works.

You see, Tomcat is a servlet runner. It isn't that interesting or even the best of breed (Jetty is way better). Tomcat is as interesting as what you do with it, and Goodwill drags you along through a flash tour of all the goodies.

Its a bit like a night tour of Naples on the back of an Italian cigarette smuggler's Vespa. Somehow, at the end, despite not having understood much, you find you know your way around and feel comfortable exloring further on your own.

Take it or leave it. That's just the kind of book it is.

Rating:
Summary: Not nearly enough detail
Review: It seems as if the author tried to get the book out the door as quickly as possible. If you are totally new to Tomcat, then you can read the book, but there is not much substance at all for anyone trying to actually implement Tomcat.

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Summary: This book could have been something special...
Review: It's a shame this book was so poorly written, and misleading in its title. The Java/Tomcat community has been struggling for some time with Tomcat, trying desperately to gain some sort of useful insight from the horrid online documentation. Then along comes this long-awaited manual that could have easily saved the day for thousands of sysadmins.
Problem is, this book provides next to no useful information on the integration of Apache and Tomcat. It's bad enough that this information comes at nearly the end of the book. What's worse, the integration chapter is only a few pages long, and goes no further (in fact, doesn't even go as far) as the documentation that's provided online.
This book is a huge disappointment - you are far better served by picking up a good O'Reilly book on servlets/JSP/etc. and figuring out the Tomcat installation/webapp deployment issues on your own.

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Summary: A disorganized preface to the open source doc.
Review: This book is poorly organized and missing essential information. You would be better off with the open source doc, and much better off with another book. I downloaded the book files and got the first set of classes running . Then I made the tiny changes suggested in Chapter 2 and went to my first servlet compile. PROBLEM 1: what and where is the jar necessary to compile? Couldn't find the info in the book, so I did a text search from the Tomcat root on the superclass the compiler was looking for. Aha, .../common/lib/servlet.jar. Then I made the suggested textual change to the JSP file. PROBLEM 2: I made a hard-to-see typo on that one, and learned what a JSP exception looked like. The book didn't cover that eventuality, so back to the web. Searching news groups told me that this was the most common JSP exception, and my installation might be faulty. So I dove into the exception printout, which is pretty opaque, and figured out my mistake. PROBLEM 3: the book says you can use a compressed war file if you "add a new Context entry in ... referencing the apress Web application." This is not a trivial task and the book gives no other help. After a few hours (!) of online searching and experimenting, I discovered this: 1. No one explains what should go in the "Config URL" slot in the "live" Manager install page in Tomcat 4. 2. If you go the <Context> route in server.xml, the error log in .../logs will probably have all the info you need about what went wrong. Book doesn't say a word about checking this if you run into trouble, but it is the FIRST place to look (OK, I was working tired). Tomcat is actually easier to use than this book.
I skimmed the rest of the book after this, then put it down forever. I went out and bought Marty Hall's "More Servlets and JavaServer Pages", and I think you should too.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good but probably not everything you think it is
Review: This is a very good book from a web developer and deployer view. It covers servlet and JSP basics and the specifics of deploying web apps on Tomcat. Important web.xml, custom tag library info, and security realm information is covered. The only real Tomcat server configuration discussion is in a chapter on the server.xml file and a chapter on integrating with the Apache server. I was disappointed in the lack of configuration info (especially SSL info, of which there was none) but I have several jsp and servlet books and this book does a better job of describing servlet and JSP deployment basics than any of them. If you are a sysadmin but not a web developer or app deployer, you will be disappointed by this book.

Rating:
Summary: All this information is online.
Review: This is quite possibly the worst book ever written. It is certainly the worst book I have ever read. It has absolutely no useful information at all.

It's hard to imagine that someone would write a book on a J2EE server and provide ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION on how to configue a JDBC datasource. Although it does tell you how to use mySQL for Tomcat user info instead of using the default xml file. Thanks for that completely useless piece of information.

It provides no information on what parts of JSP/Servlet dev. are specific to Tomcat and which are part of the standard. I could write several pages citing hundereds of other reasons why this book ..., but I think I have wasted enough of my time. Don't trust any reviews on here. If someone has given this book more stars than the minimum allowed they are probaly working for the publisher. I only wish amazon.com had negative ratings so I could give this product an accurate review.

If you are looking to get into JSP/Servlets avoid this text. Pick up the Sun "core" book and read the documentation for Tomcat. And, if you happen to see the author of this book, kick him square in the nuts. Several hundred times.

Rating:
Summary: All this information is online.
Review: This was the only Tomcat book available at the time I was looking, so I decided to pick it up to enhance my knowledge. However, almost all the information I found in it was available, sometimes verbatim, online.