Core JSTL: Mastering the JSP Standard Tag Library
by
David Geary
Prentice Hall PTR
1 edition
December 2002
608 pages
Reviewed by Thomas Paul, February 2003
(8 of 10)
The JSP Standard Tag Library is designed to simplify many of the difficult tasks encountered while creating JSPs. This book covers the new built-in tags and the expression language which are part of JSTL. The book describes itself as a "definitive" guide and that fairly well sums it up. JSTL is covered in excellent detail with lots of examples and sample code. The book is divided into three parts. The first part introduces JSTL and discusses the JSTL expression language. Examples of proper usage as well as common errors are shown. The next part covers the tags themselves (referred to as actions). This part is split over several chapters including chapters on conditional actions, iteration actions, i18n actions, database actions, and XML actions. Each action is covered in detail with at least one example of its usage. The final section is a short reference covering all the actions. Overall, I found this book to be very well written guide to JSTL. I think most Servlet/JSP developers will find this to be an excellent resource for learning JSTL. There were a couple of places in the book that I found the author's explanations a little confusing but overall he does an excellent job of helping to understand how to properly use JSTL. You should note that there is a misprint in the book that gives an incorrect URL for the site to download the source code. The correct site is: http://www.core-jstl.com.
(8 of 10)
