Core JSTL: Mastering the JSP Standard Tag Library

Rating:
Summary: I love this book!
Review: Among the few books available on JSTL, I chose to buy this book. After 2 visits to a local bookstore, I determined that this book explains the JSTL technology clearer than other JSTL books.

Also, the through examples in this book have been well thought out in depth and cover almost all of common usage of JSTL. Particularly, I like the chapters on database programming.

The paper quality of this book is also very good unlike other cheap books. One downside is that ...suppose to have the source code listed in the book but I have not been able get on it since I bought the book.

Rating:
Summary: Reliable book from a reliable author
Review: Clear, concise. solid coverage of a core technology for web development in java. This book is at the same time a useful reference and an easy tutorial. Covers the EL scripting language, base, iteration, xml, sql, networking actions.
Complete, easy to read and with working example code for EVERY concept. D.Geary and M Hall are the reference authors in the
Servlet-JSP World. If you are doing any kind of development using JSP you need this book. 'nuff said.

Rating:
Summary: Welcome Addition with Reservations
Review: I like Geary and have his Swing book ( which is in my opinion the definitive tome on the subject ). He's a good author. This new outing covers the tags quite well and with some good practical insights. There are a few things that I just would have done differently had I been the writer, but I liked the formatting and I18N chapters, perhaps the best ones out of the lot.

However, there is not even a mention of the JSP 1.2 XML syntax or how to use JSTL with it, which is [imho] a pretty glaring oversight. In the sample code none of the beans implement 'Serializable' which according to the javaDocs, is a bean requirement. The DTD the samples point to is erroneous. You have to type the samples in because the site from where you are supposed to be able to download them doesn't exist.

For someone who was so meticulous in his previous books, I find this one written by a different Geary. Maybe this is the case. But it did get me on top of the JSTL pretty quickly and that gets 3 stars. There is not much else out there on this subject at the moment.

Rating:
Summary: Core JSTL: Mastering the JSP Standard Tag Library
Review: I was new to JSTL with some JSP/Servlet experiences.
This is all I need to get started with JSTL.
Lots of example codes to help me understand.
I was particulary interested in I18N and Formatting sections and this book covers every area of JSTL including these sections fairy well. (Lots of books tend to cover very lightly on i18n sections)

I highly recommend this book! This is my JSTL reference book. I also looked at other JSLT books, but I think this is the best by far.

Rating:
Summary: Take the Next Step with Java Server Pages
Review: Last year I built a website that used Java Server Pages to dynamically generate most of the pages. It worked well, but was very kludgy. JSPs invariably mix the HTML display code with some of the internal data logic. Through a judicious use of the
Model-View-Controller paradigm, I was able to reduce this mixing. But a minimal amount was still inevitable. This is a common experience with JSPs. You end up with files containing java code and HTML. Ugly and brittle. Plus, it calls upon two areas of expertise. A separation of the two would be much more
robust, and allow people with skills in only one of these areas to still contribute to the development.

In answer to this, Sun has been refining its Standard Tag Library. Specifically, it now has an expression language that is a programming language in its own right and is comprehensively described in this book, which bears Sun's official impramateur. Programmers versed in other languages can quickly absorb this. Thru it, you can easily write code to access Java Beans and other java programs. Plenty of clear examples are provided.

Of interest to several will be how to use STL to hook up to back end SQL databases; transferring from them into webpages and transmitting user changes back into the databases.

The author also covers the important case of interacting with XML, which is now a de facto standard for data interchange. Nor does he neglect describing issues of internationalisation. Practical for those who have to support several languages.

The sum of all these is to make this book very useful for those of you needing to build JSPs in business applications. I do wish I had this book last year!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for Servlet/JSP developers
Review: The JSP Standard Tag Library is designed to simplify many of the difficult tasks encountered while creating JSPs. This book covers the new built-in tags and the expression language which are part of JSTL. The book describes itself as a "definitive" guide and that fairly well sums it up. JSTL is covered in excellent detail with lots of examples and sample code. The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces JSTL and discusses the JSTL expression language. Examples of proper usage as well as common errors are shown. The next part covers the tags themselves (referred to as actions). This part is split over several chapters including chapters on conditional actions, iteration actions, i18n actions, database actions, and XML actions. Each action is covered in detail with at least one example of its usage. The final section is a short reference covering all the actions. Overall, I found this book to be very well written guide to JSTL. I think most Servlet/JSP developers will find this to be an excellent resource for learning JSTL. There were a couple of places in the book that I found the author's explanations a little confusing but overall he does an excellent job of helping to understand how to properly use JSTL.