Customer Rating:  
Summary: Tomcat - not yet a Definitive Guide
Comment: This is not yet one of those really "Definitive Guides" as O'Reilly has published so many in the past, and that so far have always helped me out. For a relatively unexperienced Web app developer like me, too many topics are left untouched.
For instance, not a word on the many class loaders used by Tomcat, of which the one used for applications is named WebappClassLoader - my initial lack of understanding of this Tomcat idiosyncrasy has caused me a lot of trouble in the past, and this book would not have helped me.
I'm also missing the expected good advice on how to use the various directories in the Tomcat tree (common, shared) for storing common jar files.
The several ways in which a web application can be configured (with or without web.xml, with or without mapping) are described, but how a full URL will look like in each variation is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have just started to scratch the surface of development with Tomcat, and no doubt I will later on find much of value in this book, but so far I am not impressed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: THE Tomcat Bible - A must own book for anyone using Tomcat
Comment: Tomcat: The Definitive Guide is a great book about the most commonly used open-source servlet/JSP container. Tomcat is the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Tomcat is really powerful and flexible, but you really need a good book to figure out how to integrate Tomcat with Apache, how to set load-balancers, clustering, etc on all of the major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X.This is where Tomcat: The Definitive Guide comes in. This really well written book makes it easy to follow for the developer as well as non-developer admin. The book starts with an introduction of Tomcat (v4.0) where you learn how to stop/start the server, learn about the directory structure, and learn to modify the start/stop scripts as well as the configuration settings. I really like the treatment given to security, realms and JAAS in the second chapter with more details in the sixth chapter. Most books of this type will leave out security and this book deals with it in the second chapter. Kudos to the authors for that. I also really like the chapter on performance tuning that deals with real-world applications. The chapter on integration with the Apache webserver is really well written. Most people that deploy Tomcat in production will want to put Apache webserver in front of Tomcat to serve up static content like html and images while letting Tomcat handle servlets and JSPs. Most of the documentation about this Apache httpd - Tomcat integration on the Internet deals with v1.3 of Apache httpd. However, the book deals with Apache 2.0, which is another plus for the book. I can go on and on - If you are using Tomcat, planning on using Tomcat or just want to learn more about the server, this book will provide you with all of the information to help harness Tomcat's power and wealth of features. I would highly recommend this book as a companion to any servlet/JSP programming book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Great O'Reilly Title
Comment: Until I bought this book I had an agreement with Tomcat. Tomcat would serve my servlets like it was supposed to and I wouldn't try to pull any stunts. If I ran into something that wasn't working because of some setting or another in Tomcat, I avoided it. Now that I have this book, the agreement is off. This book is chock full of neat and useful tricks with some excellent examples. The book is very well written in true O'Reilly style (They even found a way to use the word "laconic" which I have never seen used in a computer book before). It illuminated various things I was unaware of, such as: ** How to run the web based Tomcat admin application
** Tomcat restart issues - this was especially interesting and gets to the heart of what java and tomcat really are.
** How to enable Tomcat's SSI servlet so that it will use your existing server-side includes The book has lots of hints of the "I know how to do this in Apache httpd, but how do I do it in Tomcat?" variety. This is in addition to an entire chapter devoted to connecting Tomcat to Apache httpd. The subject of a java web server will automatically bleed over into the subjects of Java and Unix and the book does a great job exposing the timid to Unix and Java concepts that help in understanding these technologies. For example, the book gives detailed instructions for setting up a chroot jail on a Unix type system. I read the chapter on security several times because it is really foundational. It gets at the excellent security abilities of Java and explains them better than I have seen them explained elsewhere. It also gives the basics of possible vulnerabilities of any web application. The stuff in this section applies broadly to any Servlet container, but has a lot of specifics for Tomcat. Obviously, all of the stuff in the book is available from the Java, Unix, or Tomcat documentation, but the book acts as a guide, pointing out key things in the documentation. The only limitation of the book that I could tell was that the authors are exclusively from a Unix background. This has the result of making the book slanted towards Linux/Unix. There are a couple of things that the authors show how to do on Unix but leave the impression that there is no way to do it on Windows. For example they say, "Unix type operating systems, run netstat from the command line to see the open ports. You can do this on Windows as well. They also give a Unix shell script that organizes log files so that they look like Apache httpd log files. It would have been nice to offer one for windows as well or at least give a hint for how to do so. A lot of people use Tomcat on windows as a development environment and they should not be ignored. In summary, the book succeeds in both broad concepts that deal with running any java web server and in exposing the finer details of Tomcat in particular. Another reviewer asked if this was really "Vital Information for Tomcat Programmers and Administrators" as the subtitle says. I would say yes. You get details of programming Tomcat through the configuration files and crucial details for how Tomcat settings affects how your servlets behave. Perhaps they are asking about messing around with the source code of Tomcat? Then no, it is not about programming Tomcat in that sense.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Most concise Tomcat book yet
Comment: I just got this book saturday (it's now monday) and this book has already helped me solve two problems and clairify my Tomcat thinking. This book is the best Tomcat book yet for Administrators. I have used the others (Professional Apache-Tomcat, Mastering Tomcat Development, and Apache-Jakarta Tomcat), but this one has been the best. It is very well organized and has some great helps in it. It does not try to cover everything, but it focuses on some. For example, Tomcat 3 is not covered by this book. Mod_webapp is not covered, but mod_jk2 is very well covered. The authors covers how to secure Tomcat through chroot (using a special file they ported from OpenBSD called jbchroot.c), run Tomcat as an unpriviledged user on port 80, Clustering with or without Apache, Apache integration is given REAL coverage. The best thing about this book is the focus on Administration and not development, this is obviously for administrators. The other books were focused on developers and were either way to short or had way too much scattered and confused information. Admins like things well organized and consistant.
If you are a Sys Admin and need a book on Tomcat administration, get this book and forget about the rest.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fast Changing Tomcat
Comment: Projects from Apache Jakarta must be hard to write about since they change so fast. The projects are open source and, in the case of Tomcat, considered to be specification implementations. This makes it very difficult to find an up-to-date text on the projects.Tomcat: The Definitive Guide addresses the latest technology in the Tomcat project. You will find the latest information on configuring Tomcat and also on 3rd party tools related to the technology. It's the best book available on the topic...for now. Let's hope the projects reach some level of stability (like Apache, Linux, etc.) at which point books will be easier to write and more helpful.
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