Web Development with JavaServer Pages

This is presently, one of two better books on JSP. The other book is "core servlets & jsp" by M. Hall. Hereby, I will compare these two books:1. I like the clarity of Hall's book. Hall expained everything very well although he did not touch as much depth as Fields & Kolb. Fields & Kolb's book was also well written, although a little on the verbose side; but it has the advantage of reaching further in depth: for example, the use of token handling to prevent re-execution of critical requests when the users push refresh...2. The code examples in both books are excellent and worked very well. Again, Hall's examples lack some depth. For example, the databases examples are pretty poor and another key examples such as the Travel Agency examples are not as nearly as complete. Fields & Kolb's examples, some of them probably require more of your attention, reach far more in depth. I particularly like the examples on databases and customtags, expecially the examples on FAQ which is really outstanding.My conclusion is the two books complement each other pretty well and you should buy both. And forget about those wrox books which are often an horror when it comes to testing the code examples. And you know, in programming, without good codes, you don't learn much!

Just finished reading this excellent book. I believe this is one of the best well-written books ever since Java came into existence. The things I liked about this book are:- The authors spent a lot of time explaining the fundamentals of JSP in detail, thereby providing a very good foundation.- The chapters "Architecting JSP application" and "An example JSP project" have been very useful for me. In fact, I am using the concepts and examples presented in these chapters for a project that I am working on.- The tips, notes, and warnings throughout the book are very useful in applying JSP technology in the real world.- The support sites, author-online at the Manning web site are available for us to ask questions to the authors and also for discussion on JSP. I have personally found these sites to be extremely useful.I hope to see the following things in the next version of the book:- An exclusive chapter on the fundamentals of servlets and how it ties with JSP.- An exclusive chapter on how JSP and EJB can work together - A real world "non-trivial" example will certainly help.- I would also like the authors to address some of the concerns that Jason Hunter (Author of JAVA servlet programming, by O'Reilly) listed on his site,

I read through this book in a week and I must say it is very well written. The concepts of JSP are well explained with an appropriate depth for a JSP application developer. I especially like the part when it explains the servlet-centric design. With this design model we shall be able to create large Web application with complex workflow, because we can implement an automata in the center servlet and use multiple JSPs to provide interaction with end-users. Personally I feel it very hard to understand JSP before you understand servlet. Thus I will advise any reader of this book to read some Java servlet documentation or code some Java servlets before you touch JSP or this book. It will be even better if the example in this book has a login page, a necessary component in a lot of JSP applications. Fortunately, you can find some solutions for that from the Net, so don't worry.

If you are new to Java Server Pages this is the book to start with. It covers the basics on JSP construction, bean creation and connection and how work with data bases. There is a section on how to architect JSP applications to make their construction easier.The book is full of easy to understand examples. They range from the simple "hello world" to the complex (and useful) FAQ manager. There is also in-depth coverage on how to build your own custom tag libraries. Until now you needed to wade into the Sun Java docs, this book makes custom tags painless. If you are serious about JSP / XML combinations, this is the book to get started with.

I can't say enough good things about this book. We were given the task of building a JSP project and knew nothing about the technology. This one book gave us everything we needed to understand the JSP specification from Sun. It was truly all we needed.The book is very well written and easy to follow. The authors have done an excellent job of explaining peripheral issues associated with JSP (i.e. Servlets, EJBs, etc.).The book also contains a ton of code samples that covers a variety of different solutions.If you're getting ready to start a JSP project or want to master the JSP technology from Sun, look no further than this book. You won't be disappointed!