Making Use of JSP

Rating:
Summary: Great Web Tool
Review: I was looking for a way to create Web pages on the fly from existing databases, and someone recommended JSP. This book got me off and running with JSP and helped me get done what I needed to do quickly and easily.

Rating:
Summary: Bloated and replete with typos
Review: I was very disappointed by this book. Having "cut my teeth" in Web application development using ColdFusion, I bought this book to learn JSP. Although it seems that this book was written in a task-oriented fashion in order to explain the steps and appropriate division of labor to a person who is naive to Web application development, I find that this approach is ineffective. This book is overly explicit about simple concepts and insufficiently explicit about many complex concepts. Its treatment of beans and database connectivity are especially lacking... and these are arguably the two most complex (and important) areas of JSP development. And there were MANY typographical erros in the printed code; since I am comfortable programming in Java, I recognized these typos, but I pity the Java novice who can't figure out why the darn things won't compile. In addition, much of the Java code did not follow best practices (e.g., the author frequently initializes Strings to " " rather than an empty string or null). Because of the book's task-oriented organization and poor indexing, it is not highly useful as a reference either.

I did learn something from this book but only because I understood from my advance knowledge of Web programming with ColdFusion many of the principles that the author teaches in JSP. This allowed me to recognize the errors in the book and infer principles from the code that were not explicitly explained (which was made more difficult by the many errors in the code). If this was my first foray into Web programming, I think that I would have found this book highly frustrating and of little value.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to Read
Review: The author style and step-by step approach make this book very accessible, even for someone who is new to the technology. This is a great book for getting started and getting your hands dirty with JSP.