I highly recommend this book, and will buy this authors Struts 2 book when it comes out.

After having completed some introductory Java programming work, I decided to dive into struts as I wanted to implement the MVC pattern in Java. This book helped me to achieve that without further referencing other material.

Everything I needed was in this book. The first couple of chapters outline the Struts framework using a basic (but not Hello World) example followed by an elaboration of the Model, View and Controller. The rest of the book simply builds on this example to demonstrate features. I only read the first few chapters and used the rest as a reference (I don't need Tiles for example).

The book is sparse in some ways, but it is all there. I had some tricky problems I wanted to solve and all the required information was in this book - although I did need to meditate on some of the examples to figure things out. Having said that some previous experience with JSP is useful.

Recommended, looking forward to October 24.

James Holmes's explanation of the fundamentals of Struts is very clear, thorough and specific. I am very grateful for the foundation he has given me.

Overall very good book for starters but don't expect here too much. Case study is well designed to cover most development scenarios presented in the book. However, it doesn't bother to explain how to use Struts with databases. This is a big disadvantage of the title. Besides of that if all the repeated descriptions will be removed the book might easily lose 1/3 of its weight. Nevertheless, this is not a bad book and I'll keep it as a quick reference for some while.

Overall a well written and lucid introduction to struts programming. Struts:TCR needs a better index to be a truly great reference book, but I would still recommend it to anyone starting out with struts.

This book presents the technical information in a straight forward and organized manner that is useful to a first time Struts user such as myself. The first portion does a fine job to describe what Struts is used for and how the pieces fit together and the second portion is superb raw reference material. Great combination.

According to Struts committee, Laurie Harper, in her email to Struts mailing list, Struts 1 won't go away for couple of years, due to widely adaption all over the world and it is not an easy task to migrate to Struts 2 since Struts 2 was webWork, a totally different framework.

So it is worth to publish this book and I am going to buy one soon, even I am an Advanced Struts developer. I extended Struts to read config files under designated directories instead of individual huge struts-config.xml, tiles.xml and validators.xml.

According to Struts committee, Laurie Harper, in her email to Struts mailing list, Struts 1 won't go away for couple of years, due to widely adaption all over the world and it is not an easy task to migrate to Struts 2 since Struts 2 was webWork, a totally different framework.

So it is worth to publish this book and I am going to buy one soon, even I am an Advanced Struts developer. I extended Struts to read config files under designated directories instead of individual huge struts-config.xml, tiles.xml and validators.xml.

Why publish a "2nd Edition" on Struts in December when the next generation of Struts was just weeks away from going GA? Instead, you should really focus on looking into Struts 2.0, which is a complete overhaul of the architecture.

Folks have been complaining for years about the deficiencies of Struts, most of which have been addressed by 2.0.

Do yourself a favor and wait until the inevitable avalanche of books that will come out in the coming months on Struts 2. Another option is to purchase Manning's WebWork In Action which details the framework that Struts 2.0 is built on.

This is one of the *better* books I have found, from a learning perspective, across all publishers and authors in the Java world. The author does a good job explaining many of the more esoteric and complex facets of the Struts technology with ease. His involvement with Struts is evidenced by his ability to teach it through writing.

Eventhough this book is entitled a reference guide, you should treat this more as a the definitive struts tutorial.

Here are some things that you should be aware of:
1) Chapter #2 seems a bit out-of-order. The book is based on the idea of using a case-study to learn struts. The book does a decent job pulling this off. However, the intro to the case-study seems a bit premature from a learning perspective. It feels like there should be an architectural discussion between chapter 1 (what is struts / history) and chapter 2 (intro to the case study). unfortunately, without this insight, it makes the case study hard to digest for a developer without a strong MVC or JSP background.

2) Similar to (1), it would have been nice if James had included class diagrams / UML within the book. A book as good as this would only be made better with UML.

3) The book makes quite a few references about how the JSTL has superseeded many of the struts tag libraries. Yet, the book / case-study has not been updated to reflect or reiterate this. From a learning perspective, if using JSTL instead of struts tags in the examples would only reiterate this assertion.

4) I found chapter 6 a bit hard to "follow" from a learning flow in a few places. The book does a good job describing actions and then quickly moves into a conceptual discussion around action design. Action design is definitely something that should be considered in any struts application. However, I am not sure chapter 6 is the best place for that discussion - specifically because the book did not build the foundational knowledge required to fully understand the design discussion. If you have a strong background in web application development, you probably won't be too phased by the quick transition from how actions work to how to best design your actions.

5) Chapter 8 (declarative exception handling) feels a bit out of order. From a learning perspective, it would probably be better served after the completion of the MVC discussion. This is especially true since I can not imagine building a struts application without leveraging declarative exception handling. Yet, I can (and have) built struts applications without the use of Tiles. My suggestion is to read this chapter before you read chapter 6 (validator) and 7 (tiles).

6) Lastly, the book does not discuss or explore the implications of struts. The book does not cover the cost of using struts in terms of impacts to development cycle, impacts to SDLC, adoption cycle, etc. Nor does the book examine the performance implications of struts. Futhermore, the book does not address best practices around creating a struts application.

For anyone needing to learn struts, this is THE book I recommend. In fact, it is one of the resources I recommend in DevelopIntelligence's struts courses.

A must read if you want to know all about struts.

Knowledge of Java and jsp a essential. Very nicely organized, easy to understand. Examples are great.