Book Review: Murach's Java Servlets and JSP
.
Review by: Jayson Falkner (July 4th, 2003)
Murach's Java Servlets and JSP is an average book about HTML, Servlets, and JavaServer Pages. In general, it is a fine book for beginners, but the book feels as if it was authored by someone learning the technologies and to fill a gap in Murach's Java book lineup.
Pros: What I liked about the book.
- This book assumes you know Java and provides a crash course on HTML. Not many JSP/Servlet books take this approach.
- Touches on almost all aspects of Servlets and JSP. In most cases this book gives treatment to all the relevant topics in the world of the J2EE web tier.
- The code is on a CD and it includes most of the good, free stuff: Tomcat 4.0, MySQL, and JDK 1.4. Additionally the CD contains trials of some commercial software: TextPad and HomeSite.
- Awesome pictures. When you are learning something new, pictures can help a lot. This book does a fantastic job at illustrating concepts with pictures.
- Uncommon tidbits of info. There are a few gems to be found in this text such as sending back a tab-delimited file as an Excel spreadsheet or manipulating HTTP headers to ensure a user is prompted with a file download box. These are neat little techniques to be aware of.
Cons: What I thought made this book average.
- Targeted to Windows developers. It is odd that a Java-centric book would neglect non-Windows users, especially since Linux and OSX developers are avid users of Java/Tomcat for building Servlet and JavaServer Pages projects.
- Superficial coverage of almost all important concepts. The authors do not provide convincing evidence that they understand the material at hand. Examples demonstrate functionality, but rarely do they elaborate on helpful example uses of the functionality. The text introduces a we-are-sending-e-mail example (never is it explained why you would want to from a JSP/Servlet) and continues with it throughout the first half of the book. Is this helpful? Not really. It is arguably a poor use of JSP and Servlets, and it would have been nice to see it repalced with several smaller, more relevant examples.
- No Servlet filters. Never does this book demonstrate how to code and use a Servlet filter. Given how helpful Servlet Filters are I can't understand this decision.
- Odd combination of chosen examples. In many cases I wondered why the author chose to provide a particular example. For instance, Tomcat is heavily used in this book and there are many Tomcat-specific examples such as configuring a JDBC realm. However, the authors dwell for several pages on making your own database connection pooling. Considering Tomcat will do this for you via an good, open-source implementation of connection pooling, why rehash coding it from scratch, especially in a book about Servlets and JSP? Another example, JSP and the PrintWriter object is used several times for sending non-text information to a user...why? Surely, a servlet or a filter would be a superior choice.
- Irrelevant material added. This book happens to introduce Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and XML, but goes no where with the technologies. This is a sad trend in current tech books. I believe, if you can't show a good reason why one should care about the technology, don't introduce it -- regardless of how popular the technology's name is.
- No treatment of Servlets 2.4 or JSP 2.0 (due to be 'officially' released late 2003, but public access to the semi-final specs has been around for several months). This book will be outdated quickly, although without covering Servlet filters it is hard to say this book is current with specifications that existed when it was published.
- Sparse material. Almost every page is about half full. This makes it easier to see the examples, but it wastes a lot of space. For a self-proclaimed reference, this book makes a poor argument as for why it should replace true references on your shelf.
- Salvation via the fictitious web application. Part of why I feel the authors of this book are learning Servlets and JSP is due to the template the book followed. At the end of the book is the classic, "complete" web application. The intention is that this web application concludes the text with a great illustration of how all the concepts covered are to be used. However, as I mentioned before, the majority of this book contains very superficial examples. The result is that the conclusion of this book reminds me of a tour someone would give of their first completed project: look at what I did, here is how I did it, and failure to consider if it is helpful. Salvation is not had, nor does the conclusion leave you with a practical set of tools to use in the real world.
My overall impression of this book is that it is by no means a great Servlet and JSP book, but it is much better than some of the others I have read -- thus it is an average book. You will not learn how to be a good, professional Servlet JSP developer by reading this title, nor is the book a helpful for reference. If you are a non-Windows user, this book is a waste of your time and money. However, this title is a valid text for a MS Windows users to consider learning the basics of Servlets and JSP. It may even be a much better choice than most of the other books out there in that respect, and that is the one redeeming quality of Murach's Java Servlets and JSP.
Browse all of the JSP Insider source-code.
Questions or comments? Contact support@jspinsider.com.
Copyright © 2002 Amberjack Software LLC.