Rating: 
Summary: Why would anyone give this book 5 stars
Review: I have read this book from cover to cover and used many of the examples in some of my development. There are errors in the editing to be sure. For the most part most are minor e.g. links that end with .htm instead of .html will not work or if you create the database in mySQL, in my case on a Linux platform there are errors you will run into. These errors are limited to making sure you observe the case of the letters in creating and quering your database. This book is not for the beginner. It teaches a systematic approach to building an ecommerce web site using jsp's and mysql. The reason for the 5 star rating is this book makes you go out of the box to learn ant, turbine and other opensource packages to build a working e-commmerce web site. Personally I do not like to put java code int an html page = jsp's ... but this book offers sound eamples and good advice. One of the better practical but certainly not perfect books I've bought.
Rating: 
Summary: Some valid information but stays strict to Turbine
Review: I picked up this book as a reference for integrating our PHP and MySQL designs with JSP pages. However the author sticks to a single fundamental method of JSP development for MySQL which is using Apache's Jakarta Turbine classes. No information is given as to the other mechanisms available to utilize MySQL with Java such as MySQL Connector/J or Resin JDBC. I believe this book is a very shortsighted approach to the many tools available in the Java and JSP world. I think the Turbine approach is fine, but should maybe have been a later chapter not most of the book. We developed our entire web site without the use of Turbine.Some discussion is given to strategies with JNDI and LDAP, as well as EJB. There is also a healthy discussion of XML which I believe would be better suited for an XML book, but serves as nothing more than filler here, which could have been used to expand upon the other methods of JDBC. I would have given this book three stars, but several errors in the code examples always bring down quality by at least one star. I expect a book written by a developer for the purpose of instruction to be error free in all code examples. All in all the book appears to be a step by step tutorial to building a program according to the developer's linear scheme, rather than a comprehensive discussion of all the options available to a JSP/Servlet developer integrating with MySQL. Sadly this really is the only book available on the subject at this time.
Rating:
Summary: Some valid information but stays strict to Turbine
Review: I picked up this book as a reference for integrating our PHP and MySQL designs with JSP pages. However the author sticks to a single fundamental method of JSP development for MySQL which is using Apache's Jakarta Turbine classes. No information is given as to the other mechanisms available to utilize MySQL with Java such as MySQL Connector/J or Resin JDBC. I believe this book is a very shortsighted approach to the many tools available in the Java and JSP world. I think the Turbine approach is fine, but should maybe have been a later chapter not most of the book. We developed our entire web site without the use of Turbine. Some discussion is given to strategies with JNDI and LDAP, as well as EJB. There is also a healthy discussion of XML which I believe would be better suited for an XML book, but serves as nothing more than filler here, which could have been used to expand upon the other methods of JDBC. I would have given this book three stars, but several errors in the code examples always bring down quality by at least one star. I expect a book written by a developer for the purpose of instruction to be error free in all code examples. All in all the book appears to be a step by step tutorial to building a program according to the developer's linear scheme, rather than a comprehensive discussion of all the options available to a JSP/Servlet developer integrating with MySQL. Sadly this really is the only book available on the subject at this time.
Rating: 
Summary: Good addition to a newby's JSP library
Review: I purchased this book in the hopes that it would provide a JSP newby like myself more coding examples than "Web Development with Java Server Pages" (Fields, Kolb) did. While the highly-revered Fields & Kolb book does a commendable job of explaining concepts, I always thought it was a bit light in content when it came to explaining how to get an application server and database up and running. (I'm primarily a front-end developer with limited Java and DB experience.) "MySQL and JSP Web Applications" takes a different approach. It assumes you are already somewhat familiar with programming and database concepts (the author mentions this in the introduction), and jumps right in to topics like obtaining, installing, and configuring Apache Tomcat, Ant, and MySQL. After a cursory overview of JSP and SQL, we are treated to a nice overview of the role of functional requirements in application design. Very nice stuff here. After that, we dive headfirst into the design and development of a fictitious e-commerce site with shopping cart. This book makes a great complement to the Fields/Kolb book. Unfortunately, there are some frustrating anomalies in the text (mostly in the installation / configuration sections) that seemed to have slipped by the technical editors. Still, the code examples and functional requirements discussion make it all worth the price of admission. A highly readable text, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get up and running with database-driven applications using JSP.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly edited
Review: I was encouraged when I first started reading this book, but soon I grew disappointed. The book is peppered with useful tips here and there, but in general it's too linear, as an earlier review mentioned. The book is more of a recipe for a web app than a general guide, and it wastes too much space on design process. But worse than that, it is fraught with errors, as if edited by someone who didn't understand the material. Letters have been dropped from words, referenced figures don't show what the referencing text says, there are errors in XML examples. A funny example is on the "In This Chapter" sidebar on the opening page of Chapter 2 where one of the bullet items is "Bean Resistence". More power to the beans! He meant "Bean Persistence", but hey, if you're going to get it wrong, at least spell it right. :)
Rating:
Summary: What the Doctor Ordered!
Review: If you are using the Tomcat, MySQL, JSP configuration, this book is the absolute perfect marriage of these technologies. It covers every aspect of the implementation. It is required, however, that you do have a little background in 1 or more of these technologies. The examples are excellent and at times the book is a lighthearted read. Kudos to the author.
Rating:
Summary: What the Doctor Ordered!
Review: If you are using the Tomcat, MySQL, JSP configuration, this book is the absolute perfect marriage of these technologies. It covers every aspect of the implementation. It is required, however, that you do have a little background in 1 or more of these technologies. The examples are excellent and at times the book is a lighthearted read. Kudos to the author.
Rating:
Summary: For the Masters of Ant, Log4J and Turbine
Review: The book is of no use if you don't know anything about Ant, Log4J and Turbine. While the author gets you high from chapter 1 to 6, you'll fall real low as you enter chaper7:Setting up an Application's infrastructure. You won't feel like reading the rest of the book once you hit Chapter 7. So here is one place where 7 gets unlucky. You better don't try this book !
Rating:
Summary: Australia wide Vet Locality Guide is up and running
Review: This book got me going in no time. Our website's Australia Wide Vet Locality Guide service is up and running using MySQL and JSP. I have one minor negative comment though. I wish I will no longer have the need for a magnifying glass to see the Figures in future books by this distinguished author. In this book, pages 63, 81,... particularly in page 84! Still I am giving this 5 stars for providing us the Open Source community with a great reference book. Thank you very much indeed!!
Rating:
Summary: The Worst Technical Book I've Ever Bought
Review: This is without a doubt the worst technical book I have ever bought.
Some of the problems stem from the fact that most of the packages used are now out of date. Case in point: the book walks through the installation & configuration of Turbine (which is used for connection pooling), unfortunately the connection pooling part of Turbine has now been branched off into another project (and Tomcat now includes standard J2EE connection pooling anyway). The other major problem is that a nearly every instance of example code is either sloppy and badly edited, or in some cases plainly doesn't even work without serious debugging. If you must buy this book, don't even think about trying to follow the core example application without first downloading the source-code from the authors website. You WILL be needing it, even if only to 'fill in the blanks' from the poor instructions, and to help find the coding errors. In conclusion, I would never recommend this book to anyone - even another experienced programmer trying to add JSP/Servlets to their repertoire. Do yourself a favour, buy Murach's book instead.
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