Servlets

JSP, Servlets, and MySQL

Format: Paperback
Author: David Harms
ReleaseDate: April, 2001
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Rating:

Personal opinion
I knew nothing about JSP, servlets and mysql. I found this book very helpful. My previous experience came from a standard university course in Java. The book took me through setting up tomcat, mysql,etc. It started me off using the technologies. The book is built around a core example. I didn't reproduce and test the code supplied but dipped in to take what I needed. Downloading the code from the website was confusing. Overall this book has been very helpful. I found the content concise and to the point. Thanks to the author.

A painful read..
I hate to reiterate what other reviewers have already said, but it's true: there are so many errors it's rediculous. The TOC sounded great, so I bought the book. It was painful to figure out why I wasn't understanding some of the material (for example, the SAME SQL statement produces two DIFFERENT result sets on page 208/209)when in fact it was just a very poorly edited book. The book's topics are perfect - now someone needs to go through it with a pitchfork to weed out all the errors. Not to mention that the example code you can download has been refactored (to put it nicely). It's an expensive lesson in wasted money and time and frustration, but from now on, I'll always check the reviews here before ordering any book.

Interesting title with careless content
I don't want to repeat the error in the code listings. This book has a very interesting title and the TOC look great too, but unfortunately the content is carelessly chosen/written. I just want to mention about design problems in this book.

JSP has its born-with problem that it is hard to set boundary for Server Programmer and HTML Programmer. These 2 kinds of work need different skill set. That's why separation of Data and Presention is very important to JSP web site design.

The author of this book carefully avoided to include much JSP code in HTML pages, but his design leads to another extreme: almost every control (forms, buttons, links) are generated by JSP code. This approach will create a nightmare for JSP programmers for changing the appearance of the web site.

So besides coding error, this book has design issues. I really can't imagine who should be the audience.