Mastering Tomcat Development

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Tomcat 4.1
Review: Finally a great Tomcat book for us programmers! This book does a fantastic job of explaining how to install and configure Tomcat for a variety of OSs and HTTP servers. There were a lot of changes to the Manager Application in Tomcat 4.1, and this book does a great job covering them.

The information about configuring Realms, especially the Memory and JDBC Realms, is excellent. The 20 pages on security configuration, the Security Manager, and secure webapp development are among the best I've seen. The chapters on server.xml and web.xml are insightful, and the short references in the back of the book provide info not found in the docs. Concise, useful, not repetitive.

I'm ecstatic that someone finally took the Mac seriously enough to give it equal time in the examples to!

Most important, this book recognizes that Tomcat is not used in a vacuum. There are way too many examples to list here, but overall the book does a great job of showing you how to work Tomcat into your complete Java web app development process, and how other Apache tools work in union with Tomcat to give you a complete open source solution.

Most the code examples are pretty short (there are a few more complex apps toward the back of the book) but manage to be realistic, practical, and useful. The authors struck a nice balance here. Also excellent exmaples for connection pools, JDBC, and DAOs.

Kudos to the authors! I have faith in computer books again.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the money
Review: First I bought the SAMS Tomcat Kick Start and was very disappointed on the poor job that they have done. I am happy to say that this book is great for both inexperienced users as well as experienced. There is a whole chapter on server.xml which gives enough information about tags and how to customize them. At the end of the book there are two sections (Appendix A and B)on server.xml and web.xml with tags and their descriptions which are extremely helpful.

A nice thing about this book is that I did not have to read in the order of chapter 1, 2,.... You could just go into any chapter in the book and use it as a reference. (if you are inexperienced, you should read the first a few chapters).

Before getting this book, I had no idea about security realms, and after reading chapter 8 and 18, I am doing container managed, formed based security using self signed certificates. The book also gives valuable tips on programming logic and programming practices. It was worth the money that I spent on this book.

-M-

Rating:
Summary: Don't get the e-book
Review: I love this book and have really learned a lot from it. I am a noob at tomcat and servlet programming but this book has really gotten me up to speed.
However, I just wanted to say to get the real paper book rather than the e-book. Downloading the e-book leaves you with a ton of restrictions as to what you can and can't do with the book. For instance if I want to print out a chapter to read on the road - you can't. Your only allowed, I believe, 2 40 page prints from the book and then you have to wait 1 or 2 weeks before your allowed to print anything from the book again. Also you can copy anything to the clipboard with is more than a paragraph. This is a real drag for a book with a lot of code in it where you'd like to copy and paste code to netbeans or such. You can wait a week or two until your allowed to copy or print again - but the whole purpose of a book like this is to get up to speed with development (i think) and waiting around to copy code or print a chapter to read is frustrating and silly.
You pay the same price for the e-book that you do for the paper book - the difference is that you actually OWN the paper book - the e-book you don't have the right to do anything with even though you payed $31 for it.

Rating:
Summary: Rich coverage
Review: I was suprised by the rich, detailed coverage of Tomcat in this book. Even though I use Tomcat every day I now realize there was alot I didn't understand about it. Just learning how to use Tomcat's request dumper valve for debugging was worth the price of the book. I've already saved myself countless hours of work.

This book is well written and is more than the title suggests--it is really a mini course on Java web development using Tomcat and other cutting edge Jakarta tools. The focus is always on vital concepts and practical techniques that you can put to use every day. The authors do a great job of describing how to integrate Struts, Ant, and other tools with Tomcat to basically create a Java web development environment.

The Tomcat 4.1 coverage is also excellent. I haven't found one 4.1 feature that isn't explained in this book (and better than the docs). Great!

Rating:
Summary: Hats off to "Mastering Tomcat Development"
Review: In the past year I have read a fair amount of Tomcat documentation, as well as the odd book on the topic. Tomcat is not simple - one must commit to understanding it, as it manifests its own view of the world. This book is what one needs to grok what Tomcat is and how it does what it does. It is far and away, hands-down, the best book I have read to date on the subject - no contest. The authors write intelligently, insightfully, to the point, and without the distracting (publishers: are you listening?) spate of vapid jokes that characterize so many works that pass for technical books these days.

I couldn't put this book down, I was so impressed by its quality of writing and relevance to what I wanted to know about Tomcat.

This book can safely and heartily be recommended to a friend.

Rating:
Summary: My introduction to Digital Rights Management
Review: Rare are the technical books that describe their subject in depth, and starting from first principles. They are my favorite kind, because only by knowing the theory behind you can navigate a complex technical system. Otherwise, you are stuck looking up error codes, and learning unrelated technical minutae. "Mastering Tomcat" is one of the great books that really teaches you the how and the why. Authors take their time to tell the story, and they avoid getting bogged down in needless detail.

I've read Tomcat: The Definite Guide, and Tomcat Kick Start through my Safari subscription for hours trying to get beyond "Resource not found" error when deploying my first servlet without success. After reading "Mastering Tomcat" for half an hour, I figured out the answer by myself, because finally I understood the theory behind deployment of servlets.
But you know this book is awesome from all the other reviews. Just buy it.

The reason why I am writing this review is that this is my first encounter with ebooks and digital rights.

You can purchase this book immediately on Amazon and download it after about 15 minute wait as an ebook. Instant satisfaction! Well, not quite. The book comes in a special format named "ebook". This format feels like PDF, but comes with Digital Rights Management protection. The DRM protection managed to bring my blood pressure up in about 10 minutes.

- The Acrobat Reader contacts some mother-lode server to check if I have the right to read the book when I open the download.
- I had to sign in with my .NET account to get 'verified' after the download. I wonder what they do for Linux?
- My first attempt to copy a line of code out of the book warned "You have rights to 10 copies in the next week. Are you sure you want to proceed?".

Considering that this is a computer book, and I'd love to copy more than 10 snippets of code in the next week, this was very annoying, and made me regret my electronic purchase.

Ebooks are a great idea for technical manuals. But my recommendation is to stay away from them until the terms under which books are sold are less draconian, and more helpful to the consumer. So get yourself a paper copy, hopefully it'll come with a CD for all that code.

Rating:
Summary: Not enough details
Review: Rather than calling this book "Mastering Tomcat Development", it should be called "An Overview of Tomcat". The book covers a lot of topics. But it only scratches the survace of everything, without providing enough detail to be useful. I read it through once, and got an overview, but now it just sits on my shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the money
Review: This book is an awesome accomplishment but, as with many late model software books, it's riddled with mistakes. Apparently the example code was only eyeballed rather than run.

Rating:
Summary: Needs errata.
Review: This book is an awesome accomplishment but, as with many late model software books, it's riddled with mistakes. Apparently the example code was only eyeballed rather than run.