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Summary: This book IS available and IS great!
Review: Would someone please remove the review that casts a suspicious cloud on this excellent book? This book is both very clear for the beginner and detailed enough for the old pro. The author even hangs out on the servlet interest mailing list and answers questions. There are examples for real-world issues like DB connection pooling and applet to servlet communication. If everyone on the servlet interest mailing list would read this book first the traffic would be cut in half at least. (Can you guess that I like it?)
Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff
Review: Well written and informative. I'd say that this book is up to par with O'Reilly's other Java books.
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Summary: Excellent, in-depth summary of servlets
Review: I have a preprint of this book, and even without an index and some of the figures, this is really a first-rate technical resource. It has good depth, and lots of useful examples. Karl Moss' servlet book looks good in many ways (and beat this one to market by 3-5 months), but I think the O'Reilly book will (per usual) be the best one for serious developers.
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Summary: Excellent in-depth book
Review: I completely agree with the 5-star positive reviews listed here. I saw a couple of new ones that were not so positive, so I wanted to voice my opinion.
This book is very well written - well structured, with in depth explanations, humor, good code examples. It can be used both as a tutorial and as a reference.
Even though it may be showing its age now in a couple of places (e.g. Tapestry is not mentioned, uses JDK 1.0 and 1.1 for the examples), it is still very good. It paints a complete picture, so one ends up with understanding of the principles and architecture - which is what matters - for the updated APIs there is always JavaDOC.
I don't know how suitable it is for beginners, but for an experienced programmer it is a thoroughly enjoyable read - once I started it I couldn't stop until I finished (I didn't actually type the examples - that isn't necessary for understanding the material) .
Rating:
Summary: Nicely Done
Review: This book's examples in later chapters may be a bit much for the beginner, but it does a good job of covering thing very well. Good coverage of various protocols, etc.
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Summary: ok book, not the best tutorial
Review: I found this book to be semi helpful. It would have been nice if it was more tutorial like. The examples also were not the most straightforward. The book does cover alot though.
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Summary: An essential reference text...
Review: Review
If you are starting to work in the Java world of coding, you'll quickly run into the subject of servlets. So what's a servlet? A servlet is a Java agent running on a web server that is handling requests from clients such as browsers and wireless devices. This is the most common way that you'll serve up dynamic interactive web content in applications. The browser makes a request to a web server and specifies the URL of a servlet. The servlet takes that request, does whatever is needed (such as reading a back-end data source), and then formats a response back to the browser consisting of HTML.This book will take you from the conceptual ideas of how HTTP works and how it communicates with a servlet running on the web server. You'll then learn how a servlet works and why it's such a wonderful choice for building scalable and efficient web applications. Following chapters build upon that basic framework and leads you through building a number of servlets that will show off some of the capabilities of the technology. The examples are clear and well-documented, and you will come away with the skills needed to start using servlets in your web apps. The book does not assume any particular web server, so you are free to use whatever vendor's server you want to work through the material. If you don't already have a J2EE server available to you, you can download the free Tomcat package from http://www.apache.org in order to start practicing. And why do you need this if you're a Notes/Domino developer? For the normal Notes application, this technology doesn't apply. But IBM and Lotus are pushing enhancements in the Notes/Domino framework that will allow the use of Lotus components within a J2EE framework, and that means that you will be coding servlets to generate the dynamic web content that Domino can deliver. Furthermore, if you start working with Websphere Portal (which is being pushed hard by IBM), 90% of what you code will be based on the servlet classes. This is definitely material you will need to know. Conclusion
The conclusion for this book is the same as my conclusion for the JavaServer Pages book by O'Reilly... If you want to keep moving along in the IBM/Lotus world, servlet and JSP technologies are in your future. While you may not need it right now, you WILL need it. I highly recommend this book in addition to the JavaServer Pages book. The combination of these two books will give you all you need to know in order to work in the NextGen world of IBM/Lotus.
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Summary: An Excellent choice
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. It has lots of small programs to experiment with. It is easy to read. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Servlets. This book is great for a beginner. Michael
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Summary: Definitive Servlet Tutorial
Review: We have a half dozen books on servlets lying around the office, and I've also read the online tutorial from Sun. Nothing compares in breadth, depth, or clarity to Hunter and Crawford's "Java Servlet Programming". Luckily, the second edition does not tinker with the tried and true formula of the first: brief overview, hello world servlet, a thorough overview of the HTTP protocol itself and the architecture of servlets, a discussion of thread and resource issues, and a standalone chapter on session management. Despite the 700+ pages of this book (are authors paid by the pound these days?), this core introduction remains only 200 pages and change. Each topic is presented with definitions and clear, yet realistic code examples. The authors not only provide advice on how to use servlets effectively, but also provide numerous suggestions on how to avoid common pitfalls and misconceptions. The remaining 500 pages cover topics such as security, internationalization, database connectivity and communicating with applets. Although these are not really servlet-specific issues, they are almost always present in some combination on web sites, and the authors indicate the peculiar way in which the standard Java approaches to these problems interact with the servlet architecture. Each is presented in its own clear chapter with several examples. The beauty of these chapters is that like good code, they're modular and can be read in any order. In what I think is a sensible organization, Java Server Pages (JSPs) and "application frameworks" are left for last. Both are well defined and illustrated. There's also 50 pages of reference, but frankly, I prefer the javadoc.
Rating:
Summary: Gotta have
Review: This is definitely the book you gotta have if you write Java servlets. At the former application server I was at until recently, it was basically a must buy for everyone in the professional services wing of the company.
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