JavaServer Faces in Action (In Action series)

Rating:
Summary: Lot of Good Stuff, No Bible
Review: Ok, I've had this book on early e-release from Manning since the first couple chapters were done. If you are going to get one book on JSF, this ain't the one to choose (get Core JSF by Geary and Horstmann). However, there are some really good things in this book. For instance, the custom controls examples in Core are ok, but they consist of a spinner straight to a huge tabbed pane thing (that they should have spent more time making look good). This book has an example of doing a custom component for entering dates from dropdowns which is more immediately useful than any of the other things I've seen out there for a number of reasons: binding to objects, handling a type (Date) using multiple components. (That said, the code is kind of funny in that it is very thorough in some ways and lacking in some nutty ways, for instance, if you want to present a field for a user to put a date into, it will set the dropdowns to today's date (even though the field is null); changing this behavior to having blank dates for nulls is kind of a nuisance (though a good exercise).

Wonder what the editors were thinking w/this book: if you look at the table of contents (and you have any exp at all w/JSF), you will notice that there is no real effort to be at all comprehensive. If you search in the book, many core terms and concepts don't even appear anywhere in the text.

One final note: I didn't think it could happen, but I actually am starting to prefer the PDF versions of these books. Makes searching a snap and if you have a decent size monitor, it's easy reading.

Reprise: I've changed my mind about this book. There is a lot more in here than there was in the preview. And I've come to appreciate some of the things this has that Core is not so great on. Still deserves a 4 though because of some of the other comments and the fact that some of the code really should be better; the dates custom control is kind of a mess: methods w/5 or 6 params, sloppy genericity that should have just been done as classes (even inner ones).

Rating:
Summary: Great Concept that Works for Me
Review: This book is particularly interesting in it's layout. It's part tutorial, part reference book, and 30% on line, not printed on dead trees. The book is designed to lead you through the maze of learning the material while allowing you to discover for yourself by exploring. It is also designed to allow the reader who needs to know some little point to get in, find that point, and go back to work on the real life project.

Using tutorials are the best tay to get a person up and running on a software package. You kind of blindly follow the instructions from page to page and at the end you've accomplished a few tasks that give you the introduction you need to really start learning. ==After finishing the tutorial you need a reference book that is organized so that you can rapidly find what you need for a specific task.

First the book starts with a general introduction to Faces. It shows the screen from IBM's WebSphere Application Developer, Oracle's JDeveloper, and Sun's Java Studio Creator, that's all the big IDE's and a good introduction to the kinds of support that you can find for Faces out in the real world.

It then goes on to the mandatory "Hello World" application (it presumes here that you have some experience with Java and JSP) just to get your feet a bit damp, not wet yet, but damp. After a few chapters about the architecture and standard components of Faces, the real tutorial begins with an application called ProjectTrack. Here your feet get really, really wet with web pages that combine CSS, JavaScript and of course Faces.

This concept of how to do a book really worked well for me.

Rating:
Summary: Good coverage, Practical Examples
Review: What I enjoyed so much about Kito's book was the fact that he doesn't just present the entire gamut of JSF to you in this book, he also uses it for about 6 chapters to take you (step-by-step) on a journey building a full fledged project tracking application complete with nicely laid out user interface (using JSF technologies and CSS... not just plain HTML), comprehensive feature sets, user role and security logic, database interactions... pretty much the works. I always think this is important because no matter how many API docs or Developer Guides you read, you still have questions about how XYZ component will behave in the "wild" or how you can make it do something that wasn't covered in the docs. After Kito's book I not only find it to be an excellent resource when trying to remember how a certain component worked but also a truely comprehensive proof-of-concept for JSF... the tracking system developed in the book actually struck me as something that would be much appreciated if I were to deploy it at work.

You definately get the sense from this book that it was written by someone that loves developing and is extremely versed with JSF; not someone that wanted to make some money and picked up a few tutorials on it before writing a book. Also to his credit, Kito runs the immensly helpful jsfcentral.com site that supplements the book beautifully with more resources, articles and applications (even components) for your picking after you are up and running with JSF.

A little information on me: I am a JSP/Servlet web application developer, I've done Java client side for about 5 years and server side for 3. I've played with EJBs, done a lot of Struts applications, and attempted to learn Tapestry. I wanted to learn JSF and wanted a good paced yet deeply informative book that would teach me best practices right off the bat with JSF and also talk about WHY they were best practices... this is exactly what I found this book to be. 5/5 stars from me.

Rating:
Summary: A JavaServer Faces book wortt the money!
Review: Working now for half a year with JavaServer Faces, I found this book to be indeed very helpful for guys like me having to get a JSF programming job done! Therefore, I'd like to recommend it, it's worth the money you invest!

Dirk V. Schesmer
Stuttgart/Germany