Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects (Practical Projects) (ISBN 1590599039) Book Reviews 1-8 Sorted By Most Recent, at VeryWellSaid.com

Very Good and Practical Book

The book has been written by the author with a very clear intent. Complete proof of Concept and not only Struts 2.0. It is a must read for any Developer.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-12-22 04:50:47 EST)

03-07-08

(NA)

This book is very useful

The samples in the book learn you very useful information about the Struts 2. You can download the sample codes. Futhermore you are immediately able to use them in your applications. Then you feel as you are at very good point to go forward into the details of the Struts 2.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-10-22 05:32:30 EST)

02-23-08

(NA)

walkthrough of developing a struts2 app

"Practical Apache Struts2 Web 2.0 Projects" walks you through developing an app in Struts2. It includes use cases, iterations, a build process and some unit tests.

A number of other reviews correctly point out this book is not for beginners. You should be familiar with MVC before starting out. This was ok as I wasn't expecting an "intro to struts 2" book based on the title. The author includes a section on Hibernate bare essentials to get readers with different experience on the same page.

I found there to be a good balance between how Struts 2.0 works and implementing common things you might actually want to do in practice. While the book does cover Web 2.0 a bit, this is more of an extra buzzword in the title. The last two chapters are really the Web 2.0 part - RSS and AJAX.

The end left me a little off balance. There was a whole chapter of introduction. The end was the AJAX chapter and the immediately dumped you in the index. A bit of conclusion, or at least a blank page, would have been nice.

Overall, the book was fine. It is good for a "recipes of common tasks" type book once you have read a bit about Struts 2.0.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-03-08 02:16:50 EST)

01-26-08

3\3

Much better than expected...

I was extremely disappointed in the authors other struts 2 book; and was planning to avoid this one, but all the other stuts 2 books kept slipping their date, so I picked this one up on a whim.

I'm rather surprised by the negative reviews people are giving it, as I found it a very useful book. Yes the title is a little hokey and the content only pays lip-service to Web 2.0 aspects. I have been working on my own personal projects in Struts 2 for a few months so I wasn't a complete novice coming into the book, and I lurk on both the users and developer mailing lists. I felt the material was well laid out and followed a natural progression. The book doesn't really cover MVC theory nor how it applies to any of the "Action" frameworks, so its not really a book for people with no prior experience in those areas.

The other limitation I found was the book just ends. There was no real wrap up or conclusion. Basically he finishes developing the last use case of this sample application and on the facing page is the index. To me this was the only place that felt rushed.

The book doesn't cover a fair bit of the annotation based configuration opposed to XML and a few of the more established plugins however that are a few places where it might not be "future-proof" given the works that's going on now merging/combining several of the convention-over-configuration plugins into a single unified one for struts 2.1

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-02-23 16:59:46 EST)

01-20-08

1\1

sprinkling of useful information

Like others said its not for beginners. However, that doesn't make it a bad book. If you are looking for guide for going to struts 1 to 2, this book is not it. With that said, if you are a webwork developer or already have a handle on the Struts 2 basics this book does provide some nice samples. It provides a nice sampling of how to integrate with some of the plugins that have been added over the last year. (zero config, wild cards in configuration, gwt, hibernate, spring, security). You may already be an accomplished struts 2 development however, their may be some things to take away from this to add to one's cookbook.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-01-26 19:43:33 EST)

01-05-08

1\2

Its not for beginers

Its not for beginners

This book is not good for beginners. Its very hard to follow this book with so many assumptions.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-01-21 11:44:02 EST)

01-02-08

1\1

Not a guide to Struts2

I have read a lot of technical books, and I found this one hard to follow and hard to understand. Compared to WebWork In Action, this book has done a horrible job on explaining Struts2's architect and underline terminologies. Perhaps, Struts 2 is a multihead animal framework, or the topics on Struts2 need more than 326 pages to explain.

(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-01-05 20:29:45 EST)

12-27-07

1\2

Definitively, not a good book