Using JavaServer Pages and Servlets (Special Edition Using) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I'd seen books on Java (servlets), books on JSP, books on XML, and understand the concepts of presentation/application/data layers for web applications. Unfortunately, all the books seemed to treat these techonologies as if they were stand-alone solutions. The clear focus of this book is how to get these technologies to work together to provide an elegant, modular, and easily maintainable solution to application problems.

Even in the first chapters (basic JSP application), the book is already laying out it's primary theme. It specifically draws your attention to the way the JSP's use Java in two basic areas. The first half being the creation and manipulation of objects, and the second half being the presentation of the data. It then explains that in a few chapters you'll learn that the top half should be in a servlet and the JSP should focus on the second half.

IRT some of the other reviews I've read...

Yes, you need to know some Java. This book isn't going to explain classes, polymorphism, inheritance, or interfaces to you -- it expects that you know what they mean. But simply working through a few Sun trails or a Java-in-24-hours type book will be enough.

Also, if the phrase "multi-tier application architecture" sounds like a foreign language phrase, then this book isn't really focused toward the obstacles that you're currently dealing with. A good chunk (about 1/2, I'd say) of the book is meant to clear up how to use these technologies in a multi-tier environment. If you don't know what one is, then a lot of the book is going to seem irrelevant.

But if you do know what "multi-tier" means, and you have understanding of the technologies, this is the book that fills in the gaps involved with integrating them together in a single solution.

- A very good knowledge of the Java language - Some experiemce doing HTML pages - A good idea about how a web server applications work

Because the book will not bother to explain any of these points. It contains some good tips and highlights about JSP and servlet programming, but the subjects are so loosely organized that it cannot even be considered a tutorial on them. Part of the blame is to be attributed to the subject itself: it is a rapidly evolving one and there is not yet a standard way to address many of the issues covered in the book. But anyway ...

For example: by the middle of the book the author realizes that, after going through dozens of servlet code examples, he still hadn't told you how to invoke them! Then he presents a by all means insufficient half-page outline.

For example: There are some appendices about web servers, where in the web they are and how to make them work. If you know your way through web servers, these appendices are useless, if you don't, they are insufficient.

I am not saying that the book is bad, but after going through the previous reviews you may think that this book will transform you from an application developer into a web developer. Not so. It is aimed to a very specific kind of public that know their way into web programming and are looking for some conceptual highlights. By no means a tutorial or a structured reference.