Geary: Core JavaServer Faces_3

Great book on JSF, the absolute best intro to JSF in the concise, terse, classical style of Horstmann & Geary. You can buy any book by these two dudes with your eyes shut. I would have loved to see more new material in this second edition, especially on Seam and EJB integration in general. The book being so similar to the first edition there is little need for you to buy it if you already own the previous one. The chapter on custom JSF tag development will be well over your head if you are reading the book as a first intro to JSF, and the LDAP material is pretty brutal and useless for a newbie to the subject, the chapter on opens source miscellanous frameworks is way too sparse to be useful beyond a little inspiration to learn more, but the rest of the book is top notch and will greatly help you to understand the JSF framework deep down to the bone. The monkey wrenching title is not really about the book but about my feelings towards the development of java web development (forgive the horrible pun). First there were servlets, then JSP then EJB then Struts then JSF then Seam then Facelets then Shale...Am I the only one who feels that stacking framework over framework is going definitely overboard and leading us to do "frankenstein programming"? (omg I think I am starting to blog.. pls stop me! ;)

Core JavaServer Faces in an introduction to JSF for experienced Java programmers. The beginning of the book explains that JSF is designed to support GUI development using visual tools and the hand coding as shown in the book will eventually go away. JSF includes an event model and server components sort of like Swing for web applications. One important feature of JSF is that JSF tags represent a component and rendered that generate HTML, which makes it easier to use a different display technology. The book begins with an explaining of managed beans, which are important in separating business logic from presentation, and then proceeds to show each part of JSF, event handling, validation, etc. The examples in the book are well written and complete. The example code also demonstrates good coding practices, such as using message bundles, which are beyond using JSF. The book also explains how to build complete JSF applications, explaining complex user interface layouts and connecting with back end databases. The last chapter "How do I..." answered many questions you would want answered or wouldn't have thought of to ask. This book starts with the basics of JSF and build to show the entire framework and a lot of advance features. This is an outstanding book on learning and using JSF and I would definitely recommend this book.

Struts spread like wildfire in part due to the fact that it was simple. JSF is very ambitious and defies a very simple explanation followed by a bugle blast to commence hacking. Nevermind the history of designing circuits, in software, generally the complex APIs don't get a following until a great book ships (e.g. Petzold, Roman's book on EJB, etc.). This is that book for JSF, and it is just on time. I would also like to differ with the opinion about the book being awkward because it makes you do things by hand that will soon be automated. That is a small part of the book, and doing by hand those early things helps immensely to understand the bigger picture (e.g. custom components, web services, etc.). The reasons this book deserves a 5: 1. Its score for comprehensiveness alongside similar offerings is orders of magnitude higher. 2. Tool support for web dev is unfortunately still in its infancy for Java. The webtools project in eclipse just dropped its first version of a JSP editor for bloomin' sakes. That puts more pressure on the writers to have to painstakingly describe setup and configuration issues. They do an excellent job. 3. The examples are very good and get worked from different angles to great effect. 4. There are many useful diagrams as well, for example of the processing flow, which is crucial to understanding what the framework is doing for you. I had a case where I was debugging a problem and the error message looked spurious until I consulted the flow and saw that it was repopulating the page automatically. JSF is not perfect, but this book shows that guidance can make all the difference in pain of adoption.

Over the last few months I have read four different books on Java Server Faces (JSF) and been through the Sun JSF - J2EE Tutorial. If you are going to start a new project using JSF and have a budget for just two books on the topic, I'd recommend that you buy two copies for Geary's book. One copy for your reference and one to loan out to the rest of the staff. This book starts simple and builds and builds until you have a complete picture of JSF. The 600+ pages talk about everything from building web applications to using JSF with wireless devices. This is definitely the one to buy. Hale Ed.D.

This is the best book on JSF on the market today: (1) Authors are experts. (2) Tells you how to use the technology, not just how it was designed. (3) Doesn't require prior experience with JSP, servlets. (4) No pages wasted on reference material that is available online. Highly recommended!