JavaServer Faces in Action (In Action series)

Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

Ajax in Action

Java

Core JavaServer Faces (Sun Microsystems Press Java Series)

Format: Paperback
Author: David Geary
ReleaseDate: 15 June, 2004
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Rating:

Excellent thick book on web application development with JSF
But how excellent it actually was, caught me by surprise. Reading the Amazon reviews I suspected this to be a good book.

You get introduced slowly. The authors do not even hesitate to make pedagogically motivated design shortcuts at the beginning and they comment what they will improve later on.
The code examples are complete. Though you rarely ever need all of it, it strongly helped me not to get lost in the later chapters.
The code quality is top notch with a slight taste of C. It just feels good to read the code and one learns for even completely different software contexts.
If you only want a thin book on JSF the first six chapters (270 pages) will do an excellent job on that too. In fact this would be even the better book.
The style is unpretentious and the intellectual muscle of the authors is just amazing.

Are there problems? Well I think yes, in the more advanced chapters. The authors are just too competent. The consequence: In the later chapters you learn how you could do much, and I mean really much more, than is directly covered by the JSF standard. This might be a life saver, if you really do have any of those specific problems. In a general purpose book this might encourage people to overstretch their own system.

This book focuses only on the development side of the issues. If you want to learn the visual or the usability part of web applications, you have to turn to other books.

In summary I do highly recommend this book to people interested in JSF, Web development and software in general.
.

It's OK, but there are better books on JSF available


Why:

It doesn't flow well, the examples just aren't very good, the chapters get repetitive, and overall, the book feels more like a collection of magazine articles than a unified whole. Despite the fact that I really like David Geary's other books, I was pretty disappointed with this one.

Way too much space is devoted to code listings (many repeated verbatim several times) and screen captures of directory listings. Take a look at the sample chapters to see this. In fact, most of the book is available as sample chapters online anyway. . . .

If you want to really understand how JSF works, I recommend 'Mastering JavaServer Faces' by Dudney, Lehr, Wills and Mattingly. Using that book you can seriously understand how JSF functions and how to use it effectively. I wish I had started there!

If you just need a cookbook approach, the JSF examples and JSF tutorial from Sun are more useful.

Oldish, bad examples, and scratches only surfaces
The book is too brief in most of the JSF topics, and gives examples without much explanations. Despite the high ratings of the this book, I do not recommend it to people who seek in-depth walkthroughs of JSF. You see 1/5 ~ 1/4 of the book filled with codes, and some even are incomplete.

Worst of all, most of the examples are barely scratching the surfaces of the features of JSF.

When we talk about JSF now, we expect to use an visual editor to do the tedious job of editing the meta files, codings, etc. , or something less time-consuming other than asking the reader to modify the meta file after each change. The book did go through an *overview* of the IDEs, but in the end it chose to use ant to do the job, which I believe is the author's flavor. However, all the book examples asks you to manually edit the meta files by hand, and the spaces used to put the contents of the meta files after each change just wastes a lot of spaces in the book.

Near the end of the book, the author failed horribly to include Strut's Tile in the topics. Again, scratching only the surface of Tile, the author leaves reader a handful of skins, and no meat!

In conclusion, I find this book good for only overviewing JSF, for practical coding, developing, and in-depth JSF knowledge, I suggest something else.