In a nutshell, I got more out of the docs available on apache.org.



I read the first 4 or 5 chapters, and then even skipped ahead to the chapter on debugging, to see if a later chapter might leave a better impression... To no avail...



I found myself so frustrated by the lack of depth and, most importantly, lack of examples and poor writing, that I gave up on it.



I simply cannot recommend this book.

In a nutshell, I got more out of the docs available on apache.org.

I read the first 4 or 5 chapters, and then even skipped ahead to the chapter on debugging, to see if a later chapter might leave a better impression... To no avail...

I found myself so frustrated by the lack of depth and, most importantly, lack of examples and poor writing, that I gave up on it.

I simply cannot recommend this book.

Chapters 2,5 and 7 were worth the price, as I managed to get Ant up and running, a timely digression as our Tomcat experiment evolves into a real production environment. I would suggest downloading the source, rather than trying to follow the authors' instructions on setting up your development environment (if you followed their directions, you would put your web directory under bible\tomcat\hello).

Chapters 2,5 and 7 were worth the price, as I managed to get Ant up and running, a timely digression as our Tomcat experiment evolves into a real production environment. I would suggest downloading the source, rather than trying to follow the authors' instructions on setting up your development environment (if you followed their directions, you would put your web directory under bible\tomcat\hello).

This is one of those typical "re-hash the existing documentation" books. In my own opinion it's poorly written and never attempts to explain. Well, maybe it *does* attempt to explain but it fails miserably. You might as well read the equally bad documentation that comes with Tomcat.

Of course, like so many rotten books, it adds bulk by including pages on so many non-Tomcat issues like Ant, Struts, SOAP, IDEs, etc. I kept expecting a recipe for Tuna Casserole on the next page.

I have this book but I'm getting rid of it. I made the mistake of buying it after reading a review (probably written by one of the authors) here on Amazon.

This is definitely a good book to have... I recommend it! It is a true *complete* reference to Tomcat. Pretty much all you need to know about Tomcat you can find in this book. In a nutshell, a useful book that I am constantly referencing... it is pretty comprehensive...

ceo

It is always a wonderful thing to find an excellent technical reference that is also highly *readable* - the enthusiasm of the authors for the subject is obvious to the reader and their pragmatic approach most welcome.

Regardless of if you are an experienced developer or beginner, I believe you will find a wealth of information in this book to justify the purchase. (I found the sections on how tomcat manages classloading and security of particular interest).

I believe that if your primary development and deployment platform is tomcat then this book will be of great use. Although this book is somewhat Windows centric, those of us who use real operating systems (i.e. Unix based derivatives) will still find real value from this book.

The authors obviously have deep experience with the platform and
I can only highly recommend this book to anyone working with Tomcat

Very thorough coverage of Tomcat including introductions to useful tools and technologies such as Ant, Struts, JBoss, log4j, Cactus, JMeter, etc.

I'm not really the type of reader that would read straight through Bible type books so the value is really more as a reference. There are a lot of online resources for Tomcat so I don't think the Tomcat Bible should be seen as a replacement so much as a complementary resource. Especially if you're coming in cold, there are a lot of good pointers to tools and technologies that you should follow up on.

I didn't expect thorough coverage of Struts given that this is the Apache /Tomcat/ Bible and not the Struts Bible.

Unlike Tomcat Kick Start, this book tells you explicitly that you cannot use servlets as for your app. This minor but annoying quirk is not documented in the official online doc nor Google-able - indication that the authors did their homework!

Well-organized overall, with the familiar Bible-format. Ant and another Jakarta tool got their own chapters. However, the short shrift given to Struts (<10 pages) and the lack of practice projects (the downside of the Bible-format) prevent me from giving it a higher score.

This book is a good effort. Unfortunately it is geared very much towards windows. I found myself on many occasions surfing the net to get the proper way of installing/modifying tomcat for linux as this book only gave windows instructions and "assumed" (falsely) that it would be somewhat identical for other OS. Fortunately the Internet was full of info on doing this on Linux, but a reference book on Tomcat should have covered it, specially when it calls itself the "Apache Tomcat BIBLE".

If you are a windows user and plan to use windows on your server, then this is a good book for you. For those of us who use Linux and other OS on their server... maybe another book would do better justice to Apache Tomcat.