Tapestry in Action

Kito Mann does a great job introducing JavaServer Faces in this book. He breaks the book into parts that let the reader first learn about the architecture and fundamentals of JSF, then he gets into the UI side of JSF and finally to the application programming side of JSF. This format provides a nice way to go from easy to learn concepts to the detailed programming environment. I also feel the projecttrack example application that he builds through the book is an excellent way to get hands on with JSF. My only complaint is it is for JDK 1.4 and not JDK 1.5 but I sent an email to Kito and he is working on the upgraded content.

I have been coding JSF applications for about a year now. At first, all of my JSF knowledge came from online material. I decided to purchase this book because I wanted to have a good reference for JSF on hand. I am glad that I made the purchase because even as an experienced JSF developer, this book taught me many new things. This book takes you through the development of an entire project from start to finish using JSF...it really details how JSF works and the correct way to use it. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who uses or is interested in using JSF!

Kito Mann's JSF book is superb. In addition to the twenty book chapters there are also five on-line chapters (which I haven't read yet), for a total of 1,000 pages. Before reading this book, I had read the Wiley book and part of the OReilly JSF book. There's a great deal of information in Kito's book, and absolute neophytes will probably need to re-read the material (it obviously depends on how fast they learn). I also liked the discussion on integrating JSF with Struts, which (AFAIK) is the only place where I've seen such a discussion. After I saw the Struts+JSF diagram I had an "aha" experience, and I'm sure it has saved me hours of effort trying to cull the same information from a variety of other sources. One of the book's primary strengths is its even-handed focus on the what/why/how of JSF, along with examples that are incremental developed and presented in a lucid manner. I'm planning to develop some custom JSF components, and I'll definitely have Kito's book within arm's reach!

This book is particularly interesting in it's layout. It's part tutorial, part reference book, and 30% on line, not printed on dead trees. The book is designed to lead you through the maze of learning the material while allowing you to discover for yourself by exploring. It is also designed to allow the reader who needs to know some little point to get in, find that point, and go back to work on the real life project. Using tutorials are the best tay to get a person up and running on a software package. You kind of blindly follow the instructions from page to page and at the end you've accomplished a few tasks that give you the introduction you need to really start learning. ==After finishing the tutorial you need a reference book that is organized so that you can rapidly find what you need for a specific task. First the book starts with a general introduction to Faces. It shows the screen from IBM's WebSphere Application Developer, Oracle's JDeveloper, and Sun's Java Studio Creator, that's all the big IDE's and a good introduction to the kinds of support that you can find for Faces out in the real world. It then goes on to the mandatory "Hello World" application (it presumes here that you have some experience with Java and JSP) just to get your feet a bit damp, not wet yet, but damp. After a few chapters about the architecture and standard components of Faces, the real tutorial begins with an application called ProjectTrack. Here your feet get really, really wet with web pages that combine CSS, JavaScript and of course Faces. This concept of how to do a book really worked well for me.

What I enjoyed so much about Kito's book was the fact that he doesn't just present the entire gamut of JSF to you in this book, he also uses it for about 6 chapters to take you (step-by-step) on a journey building a full fledged project tracking application complete with nicely laid out user interface (using JSF technologies and CSS... not just plain HTML), comprehensive feature sets, user role and security logic, database interactions... pretty much the works. I always think this is important because no matter how many API docs or Developer Guides you read, you still have questions about how XYZ component will behave in the "wild" or how you can make it do something that wasn't covered in the docs. After Kito's book I not only find it to be an excellent resource when trying to remember how a certain component worked but also a truely comprehensive proof-of-concept for JSF... the tracking system developed in the book actually struck me as something that would be much appreciated if I were to deploy it at work. You definately get the sense from this book that it was written by someone that loves developing and is extremely versed with JSF; not someone that wanted to make some money and picked up a few tutorials on it before writing a book. Also to his credit, Kito runs the immensly helpful jsfcentral.com site that supplements the book beautifully with more resources, articles and applications (even components) for your picking after you are up and running with JSF. A little information on me: I am a JSP/Servlet web application developer, I've done Java client side for about 5 years and server side for 3. I've played with EJBs, done a lot of Struts applications, and attempted to learn Tapestry. I wanted to learn JSF and wanted a good paced yet deeply informative book that would teach me best practices right off the bat with JSF and also talk about WHY they were best practices... this is exactly what I found this book to be. 5/5 stars from me.