Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

Web Servers

Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer)

Format: Paperback
Author: Vivek Chopra
ReleaseDate: 28 May, 2004
Publisher: Wrox
Rating:

Bad book to setup DBCP
Its discussion, even though not comprehensive, can make you can tell the difference between a valve, a service, an instance, and a server. This book gives a speedstart in getting high level architecture of Tomcat 5.

However, this book fails to provide a tested and consistent example on setting up DBCP (Apache Database Connection Pooling). Seems the information was extracted only from Apache DBCP website and reworded (such as replacing jndi/myoracle to jndi/wroxTC5) WITHOUT giving actual tested examples. I have Tomcat 5. 0. 28 running and the DBCP example mentioned 3 pages in chapter 8 and another 3 pages in chapter 14 does not work. I went looking for errata in the website but couldnt find it in the publisher's website.

It is rather disappointing and discouraging when you put your trust to a book that in the end gives bad examples.
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A collection of articles
However, it's clear that the publisher merely solicited a bunch of articles and sort of threw them together without much in the way of an overarching design. This book contains some good information. The result is that you can find answers to many common Tomcat questions in this book, but others will go unanswered.

I agree with the previous comments that this book has some major gaps in its coverage of the topic. I would also comment that some of the presentation is pretty confusing, such as the whole area of data source configuration, which is actualy covered TWICE. Which section of the book where it's covered are you supposed to follow? And, as it turns out, even though this subtopic is covered twice, they still don't manage to give a complete explanation, leaving out the important issue of setting up a context. xml file.

It's better than not having any Tomcat book at all, but this is not an exceptionally complete or well-organized book.

Not for beginners
A re-read it later on and it was a lot clearer. Very good book, but I first read it as a preparation to manage a tomcat server and I could barely understand.