How Tomcat Works

Rating:
Summary: Overrated book
Review: I admit the book serves the purpose but the information can be obtained by the specifications and the examples are not as good as those found in other similar title book

Rating:
Summary: Simply Brilliant
Review: I am not going to repeat what others have said regarding this book, but this is a must buy for any Java developers.


Rating:
Summary: I now understand Tomcat's internals
Review: I became interested after reading Richard Monson-Haefel's praising this book in his blog (http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/1372). After reading the
six free chapters from the publisher's site (www.brainysoftware.com), I decided to buy. This is a truly amazing book that covers such an advanced topic in such a simple language. I feel I do understand the internals of Tomcat now. The first Tomcat component you can build after reading this book is as simple as 20 lines or so, as demonstrated in the publisher's site. Supporting technologies, such as shutdown hook, Digester, JMX, are also well explained so that you will be really prepared to wade through complex code.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the squeemish...
Review: I bought Budi's newest book because I liked the style of his earlier book on JavaServer Faces. He has an ability that is rare for most technical authors...He can make a very complex topic understandable.

Although Tomcat is pretty easy to set up and use as a developer, to really understand the internals of the server one must wade through thousands of lines of code and even then it can be a daunting task. Furthermore, understanding the "how" is only half the battle. To really gain an understanding of the server, one must understand "why" the Jakarta folks did things the way they did.

Budi (and Paul Deck) did a great job of not just giving a code review of the server, but also describing the reasons why the server is constructed the way it is.

Having written a few Tomcat Components the hard way - trial and error - I can say the insights given in this book have helped a great deal.

But, as I say in the title, this book is not for the squeemish. There is a sizable amount of fairly complex code. To really understand the point of the book, the reader must be VERY familiar with the Java language, Java Web Applications, TCP/IP, and be willing to ponder a code listing for a while to really understand it. In other words, this is not what I would call a "passive read".

If you have the basic understanding necessary, this book will shed a great deal of light on one of the darker corners of server-side Java development.

This is great read for anybody wanting to really understand the internals of Tomcat.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the squeemish...
Review: I bought Budi's newest book because I liked the style of his earlier book on JavaServer Faces. He has an ability that is rare for most technical authors...He can make a very complex topic understandable.

Although Tomcat is pretty easy to set up and use as a developer, to really understand the internals of the server one must wade through thousands of lines of code and even then it can be a daunting task. Furthermore, understanding the "how" is only half the battle. To really gain an understanding of the server, one must understand "why" the Jakarta folks did things the way they did.

Budi (and Paul Deck) did a great job of not just giving a code review of the server, but also describing the reasons why the server is constructed the way it is.

Having written a few Tomcat Components the hard way - trial and error - I can say the insights given in this book have helped a great deal.

But, as I say in the title, this book is not for the squeemish. There is a sizable amount of fairly complex code. To really understand the point of the book, the reader must be VERY familiar with the Java language, Java Web Applications, TCP/IP, and be willing to ponder a code listing for a while to really understand it. In other words, this is not what I would call a "passive read".

If you have the basic understanding necessary, this book will shed a great deal of light on one of the darker corners of server-side Java development.

This is great read for anybody wanting to really understand the internals of Tomcat.

Rating:
Summary: does the job, but could have done it so much better
Review: I was tempted to only give this book 3 stars, but it does in fact do what it claims to do - explain how tomcat works, literally line by line. Because it starts with the most basic example and then builds on each component one at a time, this is a book best read cover to cover. Many of the subsequent example applications assume knowledge explained in previous chapters, so I had trouble using it as the reference I had hoped for.

My biggest problem with this book is that is just stops short in so many places. In general the writing is very dry, even for a technical topic such as this. Additionally, the formatting of the book makes much of it hard to follow... the code seems to flow right into the text in parts. I believe this book was published independently, so I imagine there were budget constraints, but in this case I believe it sorely hurt the readability of the book. The authors' convention of class naming is also highly irregular and leads to much confusion in regards to which version of which class is being referenced. Finally, I was highly upset to see that the author doesn't touch on the inndards of Coyote (Tomcat5's new Connector) at all, even though it claims to "cover Tomcat 4 and 5". This is a highly significant package that is essential to understanding how connectors work in Tomcat5.

If you have the time and desire to learn Tomcat from the ground up, this should be fine. However, if you're looking for a reference for a specific part of Tomcat (such as the Connector, in my case), you might want to look further.

Rating:
Summary: Best know-how of Tomcat
Review: This is best book to sit and read near by a fire but additionally you need a computer with you from time to time. I was very much pleased with the way author had described the interior design of Tomcat with reference to Catalina from a very simple component to the complex one. This book will sure help you to learn the big picture of Tomcat and its components and will also help you to run sample application servers.

It is highly recommended to download the code and use them as reference while reading and testing the chapters. This book covers both Tomcat 4 and 5 with a tiny note what has been changed from Tomcat 4 to 5.

I also liked the UML diagram and the collaboration diagram at the beginning of each/some chapters, this gives you the big picture of the package/class structure before you get into the very detail of every java class

After reading this book, if you happen to see some runtime errors from Tomcat, you will sure be able to say where and why it is happening

The book also act as a best documentation for entire Tomcat package, which you will not get even if you spend days on Tomcat website.

I would also recommend this book to any java programmer who want to see how a complex tool like Tomcat was build, which in-turn can help you to apply that knowledge while building your own in-house software.