Reviews for Struts: The Complete Reference, 2nd Edition

1. Struts - the complete reference

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, January 12rd, 2010

   My more knowledgeable colleagues tell me this book is out of date and was not a good buy - look for a book covering Struts Version 2 instead

2. Thank heavens for no Hello World!

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2008

   I commend the author for not following the crowd in doing naff Hello World examples and diving straight in from first Chapter and explaining a more meaty example for what you need to get going with Struts clearly and concisely.
   The book also has a particularly good section on testing and gives a better overview of Cactus than I've seen in other books to date, which was a nice added bonus.
   What lets the book down slightly is how certain sections of chapters are carbon copies of earlier chapters when the book goes into "reference mode". This is a minor issue, if you use it as a Reference as title implies and not read cover to cover...
   Also you learn 70%+ in first chapter and most of remaining chapters reinforce what you've already learnt, which is good for someone wanting to pick Struts up quickly.
   The source download also has some errors in Chapter 11, but they are pretty easy to resolve and by looking at javadoc for Struts. There are basic Ant scripts to help you compile code with the myriad of jars you need when working with Struts which were good too.

3. have no doubt with complete reference

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2006

   I had many doubts with Struts until I read Struts book by Mr. Holmes. The book has very good tutorial and I continue to use it as my reference when developing applications. I recommend this to all programmers.

4. Fine as an intro

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, June 12rd, 2005

   I bought this book having decided to use Struts as the development framework for a project and have been pretty disappointed. Although it is good enough introductory book on Struts it isn't much of a reference manual and is far from "complete." It misses some pretty basic information (the scope of form beans for example is never really explained, and "The Struts Tag Libraries" part lacks some critical information, such as the various rules for parameters used in each tag). Many of the examples are way too simplistic - there isn't any discussion on database connectivity either with JDBC or with a persistence framework, and so on. Read it as a leg up but be prepared for the fact that you will out grow it pretty quickly - I rarely refer to my copy and I only bought it a month ago...

5. Best of the bunch

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2004

   When learning a new subject I like to surround myself with several books to get a better all round picture. So I bought the three main Struts titles: this book, "Struts In Action", and the O'Reilly "Programming Jakarta Struts".

   IMHO this book is miles ahead of the other two both in terms of its content and structure. In contrast I found the "Struts In Action" book quite confusing, and the O'Reilly volume was a little terse - which I find to be a common problem with that publisher.