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Your search returned 13 matching documents
Struts In Action
by
Ted Husted, Cedric Dumoulin, George Franciscus, and David Winterfeldt
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Manning Publications
1 edition
November 2002
630 pages
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Reviewed by Matthew Phillips, November 2002
        (8 of 10)
Although the title of this book is not descriptive, I cannot deny the author's approach to making the reader a Struts expert is effective.
Section 1 is an introduction to Struts. By the end of the section you have written your first Struts application. This is great for someone with no prior knowlege of Struts.
Section 2 delves into the details of Struts framework. It gets away from a hands on approach to explain the details. It covers Actions, ActionForms, etc. quite well. The sample code accompanying the explanations is not enough to run, but it did help me understand the topics better.
Section 3 continues the same approach to learning as section 2 but concentrates on the presentation layer tools. One of my complaints about this book relates to its coverage of the Struts tag libraries. The chapter is clearly intended to compliment the online documentation at the Struts website and it really doesn't provide much value over it. The coverage of Tiles, validation, and localization are excellent.
Section 4 gets back to the hands on approach to effectively tie everything together. The book's organization lends itself to being a great reference, but I would have liked it to take a more hands on approach and build a large application piece by piece. I still learned more about Struts than I knew existed. I would not hesitate recommending this book to anyone that wants to go from Struts beginner to Struts expert.
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Mastering Jakarta Struts
by
James Goodwill
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Wiley
1 edition
September 2002
360 pages
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Reviewed by Paul Stevens, September 2002
(8 of 10)
This book takes a good step by step approach to giving the reader an understanding of struts. Good examples and explanations of each topic covered fairly well. Don't let the title (Mastering Jakarta Struts) deceive you. The book says it is meant as a tutorial on Stuts and that is what it is. So if you already have an understanding of Struts this book won't be right. But if you are looking to get familiar with Struts this book is a good starter.
I would like to give the author James Goodwill a big thumbs up. The source code for the book was not on the Wiley site and James emailed it to me right away.
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Programming Jakarta Struts
by
Chuck Cavaness
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O'Reilly
1 edition
November 2002
462 pages
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Reviewed by Thomas Paul, February 2003
(7 of 10)
The target for the book is any experienced Java developer who is interested in Struts but has little or no experience with Struts. The book starts with an explanation of why Struts is a "good thing" and shows how Struts fits into a web architecture. The author then gives an explanation of each of the pieces of the Struts architecture and demonstrates a simple application. Although the explanations were clear, I felt that the author was making the architecture overly complicated by explaining things out of order. A diagram showing the interrelationships of the different Struts classes and config files would have been helpful. The author covers all the expected topics such as internationalization, exception handling, logging, and the Struts tag libraries. The chapter on the Struts tag libraries could have used more examples to make the explanations clearer. The book concentrates on Struts 1.1 and the author does a nice job of explaining the changes from the 1.0 version and the features available in the new version. The chapter on the new Validator framework is clear and the examples are on target. The chapter on Tiles is short but the author does a great job of explaining how it fits into the Struts architecture. The chapter on performance seemed completely unnecessary since there was nothing in it specific to Struts. Overall this book is a good addition to the Struts library. The book has some shortcomings but it provides a good deal of value.
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Pro Jakarta Struts
by
John Carnell, Rob Harrop,
John Carnell, Jeff Linwood, Maciej Zawadzki
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Apress
second edition
March 2004
600 pages
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Reviewed by Dirk Schreckmann, July 2004
(8 of 10)
"Pro Jakarta Struts, Second Edition" by John Carnell with Rob Harrop is the best book on developing Struts-based web applications I've read. (I've read at least five or six others.)
The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, as it covers much more than just Struts 1.1 fundamentals. This book aims higher, including chapters on web application Patterns and Antipatterns, XDoclet, Velocity and ObjectRelationalBridge, along with good explanations of various Struts-specific topics.
"Pro Jakarta Struts, Second Edition" is a pretty thick book at 578 pages. I didn't notice a single page wasted to printing some API. It isn't really a technical cookbook to be placed on a nearby shelf for quick reference during development to look up the basics of using some technology. Instead, the authors focused on good practices used when developing web applications, including explanations of why a technology should be used and how to use it, recurring problems that others have experienced (Antipatterns) and what to do instead (Patterns), and other pieces of advice designed to get the reader's brain thinking in web applications.
If you're in the market for a book on Struts-based web applications, get this one. It covers Struts 1.1 well, but it doesn't stop where Struts leaves off.
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Apress
second edition
March 2004
600 pages
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Reviewed by Mark Spritzler, July 2004
(8 of 10)
This book is the second edition and is a great improvement over the first. Originally released by Wrox, the first edition was pushed out the door just before they went out of business. Apress bought the book and now publishes it.
In this edition they removed the chapter on Lucene and replaced it with a chapter on Tiles, which was briefly mentioned in the first edition. Also added are chapters on dynamic forms and the Struts Validator framework and on XDoclet. These chapters, along with the improvements and corrections in the other chapters make this edition a great choice for those learning Struts and for those that want to learn how best to architect a Struts based application.
I really admire a book that goes above and beyond teaching the basics and is more than just a glorified tutorial book. Pro Jakarta Struts goes above and beyond and presents the reader with an easy to read, well written book that gives us a formula for building successful web applications.
My only suggestion is to skip the chapter on OJB and start learning Hibernate or a JDO implementation for you database mapping tool. If you are building a simple app with a simple database, then OJB can work for you, but I found it to be fickle. I also know that if they tried to add a Hibernate chapter, this book would be very large.
If you want to learn Struts the right way, get this book.
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Apress
1 edition
August 2003
336 pages
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Reviewed by Thomas Paul, October 2003
(6 of 10)
This book is a reprint of a Wrox book that APress bought when Wrox went out of business. Although the book has a publication date of September 2003, it was actually published by Wrox earlier in the year. Also, APress intends on releasing a second edition of this book (ISBN:159059228X) in December 2003. With that in mind, let's discuss the contents of this book.
The book is broken up into five sections. The first and longest section discusses Struts. This section is very good as it concentrates on developing a Struts application and demonstrates good design while discussing the issues that make bad designs bad. This section ends with a look at using ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB) as a data access tier. Unfortunately the book uses an beta version of OJB (it is still not in release) that makes this section obsolete. The remaining chapters cover other open source tools available to developers including Velocity (template engine), Lucene (search engine), and Ant (build tool). Although it is interesting to see how each tool integrates into the Struts application developed earlier, the chapters are not long enough to give detailed information on any of these tools.
The conclusion is that if you are looking for a book on properly building a Struts application, you probably want to wait for the second edition. Since the OJB chapter is obsolete and the chapters on the other tools are fairly brief, this book doesn't provide anything that shouts, "Buy Me" from the shelves.
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Struts Survival Guide
by
Srikanth Shenoy, Nithin Mallya
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ObjectSource Publications
1 edition
February 2004
224 pages
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Reviewed by Jessica Sant, July 2004
(8 of 10)
Struts Survival Guide explains a lot of the Struts platform, and gives many effective code snippets to help guide the learning process. This book is good for someone who is just learning Struts or has previously been exposed to it and wants to learn more about all the bells and whistles. When each concept is introduced it's explained well and then the reason behind why you would or wouldn't want to use the technique is given. That kind of discussion really helps the reader to understand how they might use it in their own application.
I have two main issues with the book:
* The first is all the grammar and spelling errors that plague the book. At times it gets distracting and makes the book a bit tough to follow. But this problem may be easily addressed in a future printing the book.
* The second is their index (or lack thereof). While reviewing the book I was working on a Struts project and would often grab the book to understand a new tag or a new concept that I'd never used before, but the index rarely listed the concept I was searching for even though I knew the book covered the topic because I'd read about it previously. For this reason, I believe the book is better read cover to cover and not as a desk reference. But the $15 price and the 225-page length makes buying it for that purpose easy to handle.
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Struts: Essential Skills
by
Steven Holzner
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McGraw-Hill
1 edition
July 2004
408 pages
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Reviewed by Lasse Koskela, August 2004
(7 of 10)
I've been playing with Struts ever since 1.0 came out. However, I haven't worked with Struts on anything more than simple applications, which made this book sound like a perfect match for my needs. Especially as it covers Struts 1.2 (beta).
Mister Holzner does a great job explaining certain things that many other resources seem to omit, assuming that the reader can figure it out on her own (often by reading source code). In general, the book's contents feels like a good match for the book's stated target audience.
The negative remarks I wrote down while going through the chapters included a lot of tiny issues like not explaining all attributes (even with a one-sentence mention) of the action mappings in a Struts configuration file. Also, it was weird to be taught how one uses "javac" -- the book clearly states that working knowledge of Java is assumed.
Furthermore, many example code snippets in the book use horrible package and class names such as "ch03.ch03_05", which makes it unnecessarily difficult to keep track of which file is which. Also, the decision to employ a custom taglib, , just to set up a list of items for testing when a simple scriptlet would do?
Regardless of me whining about the smaller issues, I'd say "Struts: Essential Skills" is a great learning resource for Struts. It's far from sufficient as a reference, but I've never seen as effective a Struts tutorial than this.
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Struts Design and Programming
by
Budi Kurniawan
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BrainySoftware.com
1 edition
April 2005
450 pages
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Reviewed by Balaji Loganathan, May 2005
  (10 of 10)
You can save lot of time on browsing Internet on finding tutorials on Struts, yes this book gives you everything that you need to know on programming Struts.
Best buy for both the beginners and the experts, also tips you as a handy reference.
This book serves more than a tutorial on Struts. Even though you can find lot of free short online tutorials, this book made a great deal on putting together explaining every concept of the framework in a precise and down to earth manner.
You don't have to refer other books/sites, because each chapter is fully driven with examples, screen shots of application output framed on a browser, screen shots of webapp directory structure and the code snippets.
I particularly liked the chapters that covered the tasks like file upload, dataacesss,l18n and paging-sorting. I also liked the table listing the attributes, type and a short definition of every tag which is something that every programmer will look for.
The example codes were made ready to use with no complexity on configuring and understanding the package structure. (A little work is needed anyway).
Overall this is one of the effective Struts tutorial available in the market now.
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Struts: The Complete Reference
by
James Holmes
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McGraw-Hill
second edition
December 2006
800 pages
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Reviewed by Andrew Monkhouse, June 2007
(8 of 10)
Don't let the title confuse you: this is more than just a reference book. This book provides a worthy introduction to Struts in general, as well as references to the various Struts libraries and other components.
The one area I felt this book let's its readers down was in the areas outside of Struts that are still needed when developing Struts applications. For example, using non-standard HTML constructs (even when the standard constructs would have been easier to read), or including all the Struts libraries when not all were being used by the application at that time.
However these are minor issues: the book itself is well laid out, and easy to read. Readers who are new to Struts will soon be able to write their own Struts applications, and readers who already use Struts daily will learn new features and new tricks. This book starts with the very basics of how to get a Struts application up and running, provides information on how to scale your Struts applications so that the code and configuration does not become unwieldy, and how to make it a more professional application with information on internationalization and security. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. When counting in the reference materials, it is easy to see that this is a book that has something for anyone working with Struts, and is a valuable addition to any bookshelf.
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Struts 2 Design and Programming
by
Budi Kurniawan
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BrainySoftware
second edition
January 2008
576 pages
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Reviewed by Marc Peabody, February 2008
(9 of 10)
I'm convinced this is and will remain the authoritative book on Struts 2. I know that more are being written but I don't care. You will not find one better.
I've never worked with Struts 2 in the past yet I was able to get a pretty solid understanding of it in a very short amount of time. Granted, I've had plenty of experience with the original Struts, JSF, and other web technologies, but I think even a beginner could pick this up fairly easily.
I let a friend of mine who had used Struts 2 on a project before skim through my copy of Struts 2 Design and Programming to check for any gaping holes or errant information before writing this review. It passed his inspection. (Thanks, Eric!)
I initially was a little skeptical when I saw that this Struts 2 book includes many other topics like DAOs, Velocity, FreeMarker, Dojo, and JFreeChart. These sections actually were quite pleasant to read and were great introductions to those topics without taking anything away from the main topic.
When you start making your way into chapters 5 and 6, feel free to jump around to other chapters. Come back to these chapters every once in a while to chew off two or three of the tags at a time. This tip will add to your reading enjoyment.
Overall, this is a terrific book and I highly recommend it to anyone working with or curious about Struts 2.
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The Struts Framework: Practical Guide for Programmers
by
Sue Spielman
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Morgan Kaufmann
1 edition
October 2002
150 pages
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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.
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Learning Jakarta Struts 1.2: A concise and practical tutorial
by
Stephan Wiesner
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Packt Publishing
1 edition
August 2005
220 pages
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Reviewed by Andrew Monkhouse, September 2005
(8 of 10)
I enjoyed this book, both Mr. Wiesner's style of writing, and the way topics were introduced. The chapters are easy to read, and I never felt I was being lectured to. In addition, Mr. Wiesner has kept information relevant to the topic at hand without digressing into background information that might confuse newcomers. From as early as the second chapter you are developing in Struts, using a simple internationalization example. The chapters gradually build up from there, each one introducing new concepts in easy to read sections. By the end of the book, you will have created a simple bookstore application.
Mr. Wiesner assumes knowledge of Java, JSP, and Servlets, and expects you to have set up your JDK, Web Container, and Database before beginning. With this rudimentary knowledge, his introduction to Struts makes sense and examples are given demonstrating the differences between calling standard Java code from within a JSP and using the Struts equivalents.
My only complaints with this book are that the downloadable source code has not been converted into English (while the source code in the book has been) - this does not cause a major problem since the downloadable code is still very readable, but it does mean that the downloadable code does not exactly match the published code. Another issue is that the errata page does not appear to be regularly updated.
All in all, a very good book, and a welcome introductory book to Struts.
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Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects
by
Ian Roughley
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Apress
1 edition
November 2007
338 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, February 2008
(7 of 10)
"Practical Apache Struts2 Web 2.0 Projects" walks you through developing an app in Struts2. It includes use cases, iterations, a build process and some unit tests.
A number of other reviews correctly point out this book is not for beginners. You should be familiar with MVC before starting out. This was ok as I wasn't expecting an "intro to struts 2" book based on the title. The author includes a section on Hibernate bare essentials to get readers with different experience on the same page.
I found there to be a good balance between how Struts 2.0 works and implementing common things you might actually want to do in practice. While the book does cover Web 2.0 a bit, this is more of an extra buzzword in the title. The last two chapters are really the Web 2.0 part -- RSS and AJAX.
The end left me a little off balance. There was a whole chapter of introduction. The end was the AJAX chapter and the immediately dumped you in the index. A bit of conclusion, or at least a blank page, would have been nice.
Overall, the book was fine. It is good for a "recipes of common tasks" type book once you have read a bit about Struts 2.0.
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Apache Struts 2 Web Application Development
by
Dave Newton
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Packt
1 edition
June 15, 2009
384 pages
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Reviewed by Jeanne Boyarsky, October 2009
(7 of 10)
"Apache Struts 2" is like two books in one. The first part is a 200 page book on Struts. The second part is a 150 page series of essays on related technologies and good practices in web application development.
If you've read my previous reviews of Packt books, you'll know I tend to like their shorter books better. This book kept the attributes of a short book that I like since it's like the book was only 200 pages. The longest code example was 1.5 pages and even that length was rare. There were the collection of typos I've seen in most Packt books though which unfortunately precludes a higher rating.
The first/main part covers Struts 2 clearly and succinctly. It is fast moving, includes gotchas/tips and provides opportunities for further exploration. I particularly liked the discussion of tradeoffs with techniques when it comes to maintenance. There are notes for Struts 1 developers.
The second part is a mix. It includes things like intro to JavaScript, why version control/testing/documentation matter and how to use Struts with AJAX. I'm not clear on what some of this has to do with Struts, but it is things everyone should know. The beginning of the book is written for experienced people (along with side notes on cool techniques) and later part as if for people without training. Or maybe for people who haven't been exposed to practices?
Overall, I did learn Struts 2 from the book and was entertained throughout.
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