Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: I wish I'd bought a different book
Comment: There is some really good information in this book. The problem is, you have to wade through a mess to find it. The author is constantly referencing chapters later in the book, suggesting that the reader look ahead for information on the subject currently being talked about. Much of the information in later chapters should have been included earlier on. Besides the annoyance of having to read ahead to keep up with the current subject, the author goes back on himself constantly. Examples are shown as a functional way to do things, and then later on, I found myself being told not to follow the methods explained previously because they arent an efficient way to work. On top of this, the language of the book seems overcomplicated. Simple concepts are explained in a long drawn out fashion left me wondering where I had lost my way.
I am picking things up that I wouldn't have figured out without the book, but I'm quite convinced that another book would have had me writing applications already.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Better choices out there for learning JSP/Servlets
Comment: I bought this book hoping to learn enough of JSP/Servlets to create an e-commerce website.
My impression after reading this book is that the author tries very hard to please both beginners and intermediate developers. To this extent, he winds up pleasing no one.
Quite often he tells "advanced programmers" to jump ahead and read a later chapter. This didn't make the book flow very well. This book gives a lot of JSP code, but skimps on the code when it comes to Beans, which are critical elements to the examples. I assume the author expects the reader to download the Bean code from O'Reilly's website and decipher the code by themselves. Because of this incompleteness, I was not able to completely grasp the ideas behind the examples. It would've been better if the author included the Bean code along with the supporting JSP code. By not providing code for them, Beans are treated like a "black box" throughout this book.
The last gripe I have about this book is the author's inordinate amount of use of "..." in the code examples. Quite often in listing the codes, he would throw the three dots. Again, this renders the examples in the book almost useless to those trying to type in the code for themselves to learn.
A more thorough and coherent book for learning about JSP and Servlets would be "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" by Marty Hall and Larry Brown.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointinly basic
Comment: Coverage is okay, but the book assumes so little knowledge that it is very frustrating for an experienced web developer who just wants to add JSP to his toolbox. It spends quite a while in the middle of chapters on such basic programming knowledge as using parentheses to change the order of mathermatical operations and using "!" as a logical negator. It also explains from scratch HTML concepts like relative and absolute links, and basic form elements.
If the book were better organized, these basic concepts might have been explained in introductory chapters which one could skip (if they were even included in the first place - it seems to me that anyone who needs these things explained isn't ready to be learning JSP, though I could be wrong). But since they're embedded in the middle of JSP discussion it is hard to just skip them - and I often find myself skimming over new material simply because I've gotten into the habit.
It's not a bad book, but it needs to be better targeted at an audience of a specific skill level. For an O'Reilly book it's very disappointing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Comment: This book covers a lot of material, and tries to keep you focused on good coding practices. I'm not sure I'd recommend this to a beginner, but definately worth a read for mid-level programmers and above. This book covers a lot of ground.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good content, but bad organization
Comment: I started reading "JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition" hoping to get a good grasp of JSP.
After 3 days I was wondering why I was still confused about JSP.
Then I started reading the JSP chapter in "Java Servlet Programming, 2nd Edition by Jason Hunter" and suddenly everything made sense. I am *much* more comfortable with the coverage of JSP in "Java Servlet Programming, 2nd Edition". The JSP chapter in "Java Servlet Programming, 2nd Edition" is much more logically organized, and easy to follow.
"JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition" may have all the correct information, but I found the organization of the book to be confusing.
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