This is without a doubt the worst technical book I have ever bought.
Some of the problems stem from the fact that most of the packages used are now out of date. Case in point: the book walks through the installation & configuration of Turbine (which is used for connection pooling), unfortunately the connection pooling part of Turbine has now been branched off into another project (and Tomcat now includes standard J2EE connection pooling anyway).
The other major problem is that a nearly every instance of example code is either sloppy and badly edited, or in some cases plainly doesn't even work without serious debugging.
If you must buy this book, don't even think about trying to follow the core example application without first downloading the source-code from the authors website. You WILL be needing it, even if only to 'fill in the blanks' from the poor instructions, and to help find the coding errors.
In conclusion, I would never recommend this book to anyone - even another experienced programmer trying to add JSP/Servlets to their repertoire.
Do yourself a favour, buy Murach's book instead.
