Rating: 
Summary: Just not well done
Review: This is the worst technical book I have ever had the misfortune to read. I was originally excited to purchase the book as the Table of Contents outlined topics I am interested in studying. However, the book is riddled with text and code errors. In fact, the author had the audacity to change the downloadable source code after the book was published. Therefore, you can't even get the code source for the examples in the book, and the new code comes with no instructions! In addition, the author does a poor job of explaining the concepts he is trying to teach. M&T Books should be ashamed for publishing this poorly edited text. I truly feel that I have been swindled by this company/author and would like a full refund. The book is so bad that I will avoid all M&T Books in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly written, bad examples, error ridden = Waste!
Review: This is the worst technical book I have ever had the misfortune to read. I was originally excited to purchase the book as the Table of Contents outlined topics I am interested in studying. However, the book is riddled with text and code errors. In fact, the author had the audacity to change the downloadable source code after the book was published. Therefore, you can't even get the code source for the examples in the book, and the new code comes with no instructions! In addition, the author does a poor job of explaining the concepts he is trying to teach. M&T Books should be ashamed for publishing this poorly edited text. I truly feel that I have been swindled by this company/author and would like a full refund. The book is so bad that I will avoid all M&T Books in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Very Disapointing
Review: Wasn't there a technical editor for this book? All of the examples are riddled with errors. If it's possible for a book to leave you with less knowledge than you had before you read it, this book does that. It's really a shame. It was such a promising idea for a book.I would recommend that potential readers invest in "JavaServer Pages" by Hans Bergman and "MySQL" by Paul DuBois instead. I found everything I needed in one or the other of those two books.
Rating: 
Summary: Get ready to learn AND research errors...
Review: While I have gained a lot of knowledge and insight from reading this book, I have to say that I am more than disappointed at many of the errors in this book. As a person that enjoys typing in the examples, bringing things up and running and trying it out, I was disappointed to find that I needed to correct so much. A major example in the errors found in the examples is on pages 106 and 107 where you type in a very basic class demonstrating on how to create a "Tag Handler Class that Gets Request Parameters." Two things are wrong here as the example never handles the NullPointerException that you get from the compiler when you first start the .jsp page (because the parameter is null at that point) and uses the equality operator for verifying two strings (should have made use of the String.equals() method.) I am on page 107 (out of 500 or so) and have spent more time troubleshooting the examples than learning. I guess the publisher's deadlines were more important than teaching a good lesson!
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