The Struts Framework: Practical Guide for Programmers
by
Sue Spielman
Morgan Kaufmann
1 edition
October 2002
150 pages
Reviewed by Jessica Sant, May 2003
(7 of 10)
I found this book's introduction to Struts to be inadequate. I have a very strong understanding of JSP and Servlets and a cursory understanding of the MVC design pattern. After reading the first two chapters I was quite confused about the general workings of Struts. A small, trivial Struts application to introduce the reader to the pieces and how they are inter-related would have increased the understandability ten-fold. However, that might have cut into the author's allowed page count: realize this book is 137 pages soaking wet (including the appendix and index... I don't recommend actually soaking the book). After getting a better understanding of Struts from another source, I came back to learn the details.
The author does an good job of explaining how best to use each part of the Struts Framework (that's where the "practical guide" part comes into play). More importantly she notes the possible hang-ups that normally you'd only learn through a bad experience (Don't use instance variables in your Action classes. Don't worry if you forget this rule now -- after you've read the book, this and other gotchas are tattooed inside your head).
Overall I'd say this is a very good resource. You'll need to go elsewhere to introduce yourself to Struts (find a nicely explained step-by-step tutorial), but after that, this book will be able to take you most of the way to a well-designed Struts implementation.
(7 of 10)
