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Title: Struts Survival Guide: Basics to Best Practices by Srikanth Shenoy, Nithin Mallya ISBN: 0-9748488-0-8 Publisher: Objectsource Llc Pub. Date: February, 2004 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (12 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Best book to come upto speed with Struts
Comment: After having worked almost entirely with back end for nearly 4 years, I am having my second take at web tier development with J2EE. Things have changed a lot since my last stint. I found myself using Struts.

I picked this book because of some of the positive reviews for this book. Plus the lead developer on our project asked me to read this book. This book turned out to be a good one.

I especially liked the Chapter 1 that made a case for Struts very well. By the end of Chapter 2 and 3 I found myself writing simple Struts applications.

Chapter 4 had some intermediate level stuff like Struts Actions and some practical advices on using Struts. I was pretty surprised since this book took me to an intermediate stage in a new technology (for me) in just under 40 pages.

Chapter 6 is pretty cool. It talks about quite a bit of advanced tag stuff like
1) customizing image button tags to isolate the Action changes
2) JSTL and Struts-EL
3) A good scheme for multi page navigation (prev, next etc) when the result set is quite large (I am itching to use this at work)
4) Using Pager Taglib with Struts
5) Editing Form with tables.

One small grouse I have regarding this chapter is that it made me refer back to Struts project doucmentation. The chapter states that in the begining that it doesnt repeat tag related docs available publicly. I think it would have been good if all tag info was in the book (even if it was repetition). This chapter is targetted to working developers. For a beginer like me, it took a while to digest this. But once I was through it, it is good.

Chapter 9 is pretty heady stuff. Exception handling in combination with Struts is covered to the last detail. What I liked about the chapter is that, it talks about the exception handling not just from a Struts application but at the system level. Having developed ejb aplications myself and had to pass on exceptions to web tier, I very much appreciate the picture presented in this chapter. I call it "my concise guide to better production support". The chapter is a dense read however.

Chapter 10 seems to be another goodie. I havent had time to read it yet, but I find the lead developer in our project using some stuff out of this chapter to develop to develop framework in our project.

Overall I must say, I am very pleased with this book.

A lot of us are in hurry to come upto speed with new technology and dont have time to read thick books on Struts that start with introduction to J2EE Servlet specification.

This book was such a relief. I recommend it to anybody starting on Struts.

Rating: 5
Summary: A MUST read for every Struts developer
Comment: I started reading the ebook version with some skeptisicm as the book is from a first time Publisher. My view has changed since then remarkably. As I read the ebook, I was impressed by the practical coverage in this book - which also convinced me to buy the printed book. The book has some typos but they are really minor and did not distract me much and neither has prevented me from giving five stars to this book.

The book was best value for my money It manages to do justice to Struts and its best practices in a short 225 page and costs just 14.95. The book deserves its subtitle "Basics to Best Practices".
Doesnt matter if you are a beginer or an expert in Struts - You will find this book useful.

The book starts off with an excellent introduction to MVC and how Struts fits into MVC. It then explains the basics of Struts very well and develops a hands-on application in Struts.

The fun starts from Chapter 4 onwards.
Chapter 4 covers advanced Struts concepts and presents some interesting ideas about Struts Action design.

Chapter 6, 9 and 10 were killer stuff. I have three other Struts books with me, yet I found these chapters totally novel concepts found nowhere else.

For example, Chapter 6 explained how to modify the Struts BaseTag, CheckboxTag to handle some scenarios where they dont work out-of-the-box. It provided a thorough coverage of Struts Form submissions with Image Buttons. I was doing it wrong all these time!!. Chapter 6 also covered JSTL and how to use Struts-EL. Probably the crown jewel(s) from Chapter 6 are:

a) How to handle editable List based Forms
b) How to handle Multi page read only lists (by integrating the popular Pageer Taglib from jsptags.com with Struts)
c) A high-performance page traversal framework mechanism

Chapter 7 covers Tiles. Coverage of Tiles elsewhere I read on the net try to cover every feature in Tiles - many of which confuse me. This book sticks to just one way of using Tiles - which I think is the best way to use Tiles.

Chapter 9 is about Exception handling with Struts. I have one word to say "Fantastic" !!! The coverage of Exception handling alone is probably worth the price of the book. It provides a solid framework to handle Exceptions in Struts, log them in a centralized manner and report and alert in a production environment. I plan to use this framework AS IS in the project I am currently working on. Most other books on Struts limit their exception chapter to explaining differences between Checked v/s Unchecked exceptions and telling how the tags work in the struts-config.xml.

Chapter 10 is for folks who want to customize Struts and reap its benefits in design and development of production systems.
It presents three of four examples of how Struts can be effectively customized.
The best among them was how to how to handle duplicate form submissions in a generic manner. We all have to deal with duplicate form submissions in daily life and handle them on usecase basis by using the Synchronizer tokens. The technique illustrated here no doubt relies on the Sync token but uses it a very ingenious manner, presents a generic Action class. I liked this technique.
Other techniques I liked are that the chapter provides a Dispatch Action like functionality for Image based form submission. The DispatchAction in Struts is great, unfortunately I can use it only under certain restrictions. One of them is that the all of the buttons have to have the same name. This technique removes that restriction and opens a world of possibilities for designing cleaner applications while providing enhanced user experience.

If you architect, design and develop Struts based applications for your living, do yourself a favor - Go buy this book. I bet you will not have it in your book shelf but in your hand everyday.

Rating: 2
Summary: Good for beginners but full of mistakes 2.5/5
Comment: I found this book very useful to take me from total novice to - one month experience. After this the book is not a lot of use. I am not here to bag the book but here are the facts. It is riddled with spelling errors, (not that I can spell), grammar, and code errors. Fortumately most of these were obvious but still very annoying. It has a really good step by step section on what happends with a request in struts, which classes and methods are called and how to set up your first app. The best practices stuff is more about personal coding style. There are long chapters on actions and validation, but it falls very far short on struts tags (30/210) pages not nearly enough. Almost nothing on iterating though beans to display data, so critical to most apps. a whole chapter on 18n (useless to most apps - can read elswhere). A Chapter on Tiles. Overall 2nd ed. (if) should have more structure in mind / more tables and code and less novel-like paragraphs. Much more on tags and displaying beans. I got this with Jakata Struts Pocket Reference and they complement very well, Pocket reference being outstanding for the tag lib. For US-15 its ok value.

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