The best tutorial for the novice, 11 Jul 2003

The book starts by guiding the reader through the process of installing Tomcat (all the samples use Tomcat as the servlet engine) and creating a simple HTML page before they introduce you to Servlets and JSP. Servlets and JSP are covered separately and then working together in the Model 2 architecture. The one thing missing from this section is any mention of Struts or other MVC frameworks. Advanced topics such as using SSL and restricting access to a web site are covered very well and in a way that makes it easy to follow and understand. The authors even show how to write your own tag libraries. Unfortunately, no mention is made of JSTL. The authors show how to install and use MySQL and how to code SQL before moving on to explain using JDBC in a web application. The book ends with a complete sample application of an online store including secure credit card handling.

This is an excellent tutorial that will painlessly teach you how to write complex web applications. I doubt that there is another book available that makes the subject this easy to understand.

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Great All-Rounder, 13 May 2004

Let me give you the background on who I am - I am a 3rd year student at university, going into my final year, about to start a project requiring in-depth knowledge of java servlets.

The project I am about to undertake is NOT an e-commerce site. So my first fear was that this book was going to focus too much on retail websites, and not enough on the wider scope of java servlets in general. I was quickly proven wrong. This book is excellent in it's instruction, and although it assumes the user is using a certain system (Apache Tomcat/MySQL/JSP+Servlet combinations), its instruction is not limited to this system.

It has just the right amount of "the other stuff" too. I've never used JDBC before, but thanks to this book I am now quite competent. Other topics include XML, HTML, Security and many more. The only thing it perhaps skimped on was the use of regular Java classes in web apps. However this is probably due to the potential overlap with the other Murach book - Java 2 which I have not read.

So whatever your application of Java Servlets or Java Server Pages, I cannot recommend this book enough to you.

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