Rating: 
Summary: Excellent starter
Review: This book was easy to read and made it easy to make things happen very fast. It skipped alot of detail but some web searches after burning through the book made that detail understandable. This was worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Narrow coverage, easy to follow format, but poor editing job
Review: This book would be a good book to start with for Struts beginners, but in no case this should be the last. One good thing is that the author takes the reader thru easy-to-follow steps to setup and code for every example/feature. Highlighting changes to a file as it matures thru different stages is a good idea but has not been carried thru in a clean way in this book, this book looks like it has been published in a hurry, some sections has not been updated after a cut&paste, some method signatures are not proper (init in PlugIn), I gather struts-tiles could have been used to beautifully demonstrate the power of Plugins.Struts framework has been the seed for so many different solutions and other frameworks that one would expect atleast some passing mention of tools and solutions based on Struts, nada, there's none here, this book solely focuses on a couple of Struts related classes and the taglibs, one needs to know more in order to weild the full power provided by Struts. I can only suggest this as a quick reference for beginners, nothing more. by the way, if you are using TomCat 5.0.7 and wondering why the application does not work, upgrade TomCat, bug there! I strongly recommend 'Struts in Action' by ted Husted et. al. in addition to/ instead of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not Quite a Must Have
Review: This highly anticipated book by a well respected author was pretty much a big let down for me. I expected more details and examples on how to use the Stuts custom tags. It looked like he just reworded the Sun specification and examples. I would not recommend buying this one.
Rating:
Summary: Great Coverage of 1.1
Review: This is a great text on an often poorly documented topic. It does not cover a couple of the 1.1 topics, but it does an excellent job of describing everything that I needed. It was also written extremely well, which is more than I can say for some of the other texts. I am very satisfied with my purchase.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of time
Review: This is a managerial-level overview of Apache's Struts Framework. When trying to learn how to actually develop an application, I found this book to be completely useless. Buy the O'Reilly book or Husted's instead to get a real guide to Struts that will actually help.
Rating: 
Summary: Good essentials
Review: This is a nice review of the essentials of Struts. I would recommend it for anyone that want's a quick intro. Being new to the Struts framework, I was able to assemble an effective proof of concept application using Struts in an afternoon. The only thing lacking is a review of templates, etc. These are very powerful tools which are neglected by the author.
Rating:
Summary: Simple and outdated
Review: This is a quick read on struts. By the time it came out, it was a little outdated and some of the code did not work. The concepts were described quite well and example that did work were well done. This is written for struts 1.0 and not 1.1 and definitely not 1.2. Find this one at the outlet bookstore or buy it used if you think you really need it, or better yet, borrow it from a friend.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this book!
Review: This is just another example of the way James Goodwill writes books lately. They are rushed out and lacking critical information to be useful. If you are going to be using Struts, you WILL have lots of questions that are not answered by this book. Don't waste your money on it or any other book by James Goodwill! I have a two of them and they both really bad. Sorry James!
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this book!
Review: This is just another example of the way James Goodwill writes books lately. They are rushed out and lacking critical information to be useful. If you are going to be using Struts, you WILL have lots of questions that are not answered by this book. Don't waste your money on it or any other book by James Goodwill! I have a two of them and they both really bad. Sorry James!
Rating:
Summary: Great book, makes it simple
Review: This was a great book. It talks in great depth, not only about Struts, but also about J2EE in general. I would have called myself an upper-intermediate Java programmer when I picked up this book, but an a total newbie to J2EE. I put away my "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" (Hall) and "Enterprise JavaBeans (Monson-Haefel) books that were far too difficult to read in favor of this book's simple approach. It was AWESOME that he went through each and every one of the Struts JSP custom tags, describing their usage, and the attributes of each tag. I found this incredibly useful. I agreed that the examples in the book were real-world, and I found them effective in helping solidify my understanding. I was especially pleased with the time he spent on database access. This is documentation that is hard to find with Struts (and, frankly, with many Java application frameworks). But, there were some difficulties about the book that I didn't quite understand: 1. His database-access code is poorly written. He doesn't reuse any of the JDBC code. He isn't writing a book on a JDBC persistence layer API, I realize, but it made things difficult to follow as I focused on the code deficiences. An exercise for the reader to develop, I guess. 2. The code, as it is written in the book (and downloaded from the web site) doesn't execute without exceptions upon deployment to my JBoss container. If you're going to publish code in a book as an example, it really should compile and execute without modification. Otherwise, you should indicate that it doesn't execute unless you first do steps x, y, and z. 3. Chapter 5, on Views covers in good depth how to use the JSP pages as data gathering mechanisms (subheading "JSPs that Gather Data"), but doesn't cover AT ALL how to present that data. I guess he assumes we all know how to present it! In chapter 11, he covers how to use the <html:iterate/> custom tag to iterate over the result sets obtained from a database query, but there is no real detail in the book about it. I would imagine that 98% of us will be using this mechanism HEAVILY, and felt like it deserved a better treatment within chapter 5. 4. He didn't cover ANY of the M of MVC. He lumped all his JDBC code into his Action classes, which doesn't seem like good design to me. Also, it seemed like he made an assumption that Model = Database. This isn't exactly the case.
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