by Ted N. Husted, Cedric Dumoulin, George Franciscus, David Winterfeldt
Published by Manning Publications Review by Paul Hill After wadding through a few on-line examples and having dealt with another struts book which I found to be poorly organized, I recently turned to the Struts in Action. This is the book for me! I found it to be tight enough on information that you don't fall asleep as you work your way through book, but also well organizd enough to be useful. It contains some surprisingly dense sections masquerading as a long series of small examples. The tiles chapter comes to mind as a good example. In what appears to be an idiots guide to converting a non-tiles page to tiles page he manages to visit several possible patterns for using JSPs and struts from no-struts at all to subclassed definitions in the tiles.xml, stopping along the way and "spoon-feeding" the difference between all of the confusingly similar tiles tags. Such apparently simplistic lines such as "rename the to elements" serves the beginner, but also serves as well as any bullet list of differences for the more experienced developer. This is particularly the case, when you are looking in your books to help you debug an apparently valid, but non-functional use of something obscure like a tiles tags which you pasted but forgot to change, or in which you accidently used the wrong attribute. Reading this book, you could tell that the authors were very familiar with the material enough to discuss various choices providing useful explanation for their particular designs. They also, did not bother to list ever possible choice and XML attribute choosing instead to explain how to use the important bits and assuming you can use the terse on-line documentation yourself for other more obscure bits. Despite the fact that in one chapter I realized I was reading something by one of the co-authors, I think some credit is due the editors at Manning. Recently they seem to have produced, not the thickest books on a subject, nor the most encyclopedic or pedantic, but certainly well organized and very readable and thus very useful books. Overall, I recommend this book for general learning and reference. Sure I might suggest you wade through the shorter but much less readable O'Reilly book, if you find some compelling need to write your own RequestProcessor. But if you want to learn how to use Struts as it was intended from some of the folks who have been using it, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Struts In Action.
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