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Book Review: Professional JSP Site Design Coding Core Web Applications

Author(s): Kevin Duffey, Vikram Goyal, Ted Husted, Lance Lavandowska, Sathya Narayana Panduranga, Krishnaraj Perrumal, Joe Walnes, Richard Huss, Meeraj Moidoo Kunnumpurath

Publisher: Wrox

Publication Date: 2001

Pages: 866

ISBN: 1861005512

Amazon.com link with referral from JSP Insider

Reviewed by Jayson Falkner

Professional JSP Site Design Coding Core Web Applications is a book aimed at helping an experienced JSP and Servlet developer create a robust and scalable web site. The book combines nine different authors to discuss most all the topics associated with developing a good web site. From caches and browsers to page layout and navigation this book covers the client-side, and from design patters and frameworks to security and scalability this book covers the server-side. Given all the information covered there is undoubtedly something to be found useful in this book for any JSP web developer.

Unfortunately finding one or two things useful is no excuse to spend the $60 dollars for another hefty sized JSP book. Before running out and purchasing this title be sure to take a peek at what is inside. On the Wrox flow chart of titles this book ranks near the top and suggests reader are familiar with the topics talked about in the Beginning JSP and Java books, the Professional Java Server Programming, and Professional JSP and EJB titles. If you have honestly purchased and read all of these titles there is very little you'll take away from this book. Assuming you haven't read these previous titles, this book is a good but out of sync collection design patterns and various frameworks that sometimes try to reiterate over assumed knowledge and sometimes take too much liberty thereof.

What I liked:

Great introduction and examples of existing Java tools including the Struts Framework, the Lucene search engine, and Apache Jetspeed.
J2EE design pattern discussion

What I disliked:

Nine authors! This book tells and examples how great something is only to completely forget about it in the next chapter. The nine authors all cover different topics, but they poorly leverage off what each other explains.
Little theory, lots of examples. This book primarily focuses on showing you how to use an already built components. In some cases, specifically Struts, it seemed like I was reading a second version of the already made user's guide.

Do I recommend this title?

If I knew of a good J2EE design pattern book, a good JSP and Servlet book, and a fantastic book on a free and popular framework, all that you could buy for $60 dollars, I'd say no. However, I do recommend this book. The book does have some great information, and it will help you get up and running with a powerful JSP and Servlet web site. Be aware that a lot of material in this book will quickly be outdated, but realize this also means that there are few if any other JSP books that can currently compete with it to cover the same topics.

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