JSP, Servlets, and MySQL [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The arrangement of text and examples makes it confusing to read, and I often found myself flipping pages back and forth to try and grasp what the author was talking about. Often there was first a result, and then examples of all the files used to get that result. In my experience, most computer books show you the pieces and then the finished product. This backwards organization made many of the explanations more difficult than they needed to be. While the introduction section had lots of decent content, the way it flowed made it a more difficult read than it needed to be.

I browsed the part on MySQL. Most of it dealt with database design and normalization as opposed to the MySQL server and it's configuration. All of the information in this book regarding MySQL is in the "getting started" section of the MySQL documentation. The explanations regarding database design were terrible, and the suggestions regarding how to design the database were obviously made by someone with very little programming (and especially maintenance) experience.

When I finally got to the meat (part three and four) I found that the same poor organization of part one was still present, and beyond a URL for the MySQL JDBC driver, none of the content is worth reading. The design patterns are poorly explained, to the point where they suggest obscene programming techniques. When the author suggested to name files ".htm" instead of ".html" to avoid infinite loops when using the MVC design pattern, I finally put the book down, went to the bookstore, and bought something else. You do not correct an infinite loop by implementing a naming convention -- you correct it by not creating the scenario in the first place.

David Harms does not demonstrate a strong understanding of the content, nor does he demonstrate a strong understanding of programming. The book I bought on my second trip to the bookstore was "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" by Marty Hall (Sun), and I've learned more from chapters one and two than I did reading the first 300 pages of this book. This book is a waste of time and money, and I pity those that use it as a guide.

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!

Some of the examples were useful. But, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone trying to learn about Java or JSP.

As someone already wrote, the link to the Java drivers for MySQL was probably the most valuable thing in this book.