Jakarta Struts Cookbook

I worked on a Struts application for almost a year before buying a few Struts books. Since I started building an e-commerce application for a large retail company I needed to know the ins and outs of Struts. I bought... Struts: The Complete Reference - great intro and reference book!! Struts Recipes - some good recipes in there, but not often used. Struts Cookbook (this book) - excellent book! I use it all of the time to get ideas on how to do something. This is a must have for anyone working on a Struts application. It deals with Struts 1.2 which is the latest version - but look out, version 2 of Struts is on it's way.

I needed a book that showed concrete real world examples of implementing solutions in struts. This book hit the target right on. I would recommend this book to anyone who has been using struts for awhile and just needs to see some proven solutions to solving real world problems with Struts and other associated APIs.

Great book for learning how struts works in the real world. It has great point solutions to common problems, which also help with the understanding of the struts framework. And nice, easy to read flow, with complete examples. The best thing about a cookbook is that you don't have to go in any sequence through all the chapters, you can find the problem in the content and jump right to it. I would recommend buying a struts reference book in addition to this, and when you do that make sure it covers the latest version of struts.

I am a Struts newbie and have been working with Struts for only two weeks yet the Jakarta Struts Cookbook helped me build a Wizard-Style page Flow application (pages 199 to 203 in the book). Without this book I would have been totally lost and probebly very frustrated. One thing I really liked is that the author chose to use the LookupDispatchAction rather than having an Action for each step in a wizard-style application. As I look through the book I can see there are very insightful and intuitive recipe's for dealing with future projects like pages 90 to 95 on how to Handle Date Input Fields. Even if you are a Struts newbie this book will help you figure out how to do specific advanced tasks. If you are looking for quick information to add to your projects then this book is a great buy.

With this comprehensive work, Bill Siggelkow has covered the fundamental key Struts topics, about which every Struts developer should be knowledgeable. By key Struts topics, I mean discussions of validation, exception handling, module configuration, the different ways to dispatch to an action, and Tiles - just to name a few. I particularly appreciate how large topics are divided, dispersed across several chapters, to be discussed in relation to broader subjects. For example, if you want to know more about Struts modules, I found 5 different recipe-like discussions, in 4 different chapters. This book should be used as an how-to reference, particulary for intermediate-to-advanced Struts developers. If there is some special form control you want to use, or a wizard, or how to create tabs on your web page, you will find it here. And thankfully the author writes well; in a very few pages, a given topic/recipe is explained clearly and succinctly. I have been using Struts for almost 4 years, now to discover that there is a lot more for me to learn and use.