Finally a great Tomcat book for us programmers! This book does a fantastic job of explaining how to install and configure Tomcat for a variety of OSs and HTTP servers. There were a lot of changes to the Manager Application in Tomcat 4.1, and this book does a great job covering them.
The information about configuring Realms, especially the Memory and JDBC Realms, is excellent. The 20 pages on security configuration, the Security Manager, and secure webapp development are among the best I've seen. The chapters on server.xml and web.xml are insightful, and the short references in the back of the book provide info not found in the docs. Concise, useful, not repetitive.
I'm ecstatic that someone finally took the Mac seriously enough to give it equal time in the examples to!
Most important, this book recognizes that Tomcat is not used in a vacuum. There are way too many examples to list here, but overall the book does a great job of showing you how to work Tomcat into your complete Java web app development process, and how other Apache tools work in union with Tomcat to give you a complete open source solution.
Most the code examples are pretty short (there are a few more complex apps toward the back of the book) but manage to be realistic, practical, and useful. The authors struck a nice balance here. Also excellent exmaples for connection pools, JDBC, and DAOs.
Kudos to the authors! I have faith in computer books again.
