This book stinks!
This book is extremely shallow, and leaves the reader poorly prepared for real world tasks. Bakharia takes a cookbook approach, showing the reader how to do some particular task, but never explaining why something is done a particular way, or what to do if something goes wrong. Rarely are we given pointers to where we can find more information on a subject.
Just one example is the 5 pages in the book on "Using XSL to format an XML document." While this sounds fascinating (to me), the content is merely an annotated listing of one particular XSL document for one particular task, with absolutely no explanation of what any of the tags and other elements of this document mean. The only useful bit of information in these pages is a URL for an online XSL tutorial. Gee, thanks!
If you want to learn JSP, buy a different book.
Great book for a developer's first JSP pages
This book was the first book I read on JSP pages. Thank God. The book is very easy to read and understand the code is clear and simple. If you think you are ready for JSP and are looking for a book to teach you the basics this is the book. It also comes with a CD that has a copy of Jrun and a database to install on your PC and give it all a try. This is a huge help.
Basic, but some useful code
First day impression:
This is defintely an ideal book for a beginner. The first few chapters are slow and if you are already up and running you can skip them. The first code I tried from chapter 5 (the replace method) has an error.
The object oriented explanation.. I wasn't too thrilled about.
BUT today finally (after a rocky start, and after weeks trying to figure out code from other sources) with this book I have at least reolved one problem.
Fast track to JSP
This book is great! It is one of the few beginners books that manages to simplify complex JSP topics. All books for beginners should be written like this. Many practical examples are also provided. The sample shopping cart introduced me to a lot of concepts.
Files cannot be run ...
When I first read this book, I really glad I bought it because it is easy to follow. But now i have second thought. The source files for the entire chapter 12 cannot be run. It seems that there are mistakes in the written code. If anyone has figured out how to correct the problems, i would appreciate if you could kindly drop me a mail. The most annoying part of all, the publisher web site does not post any errata or forum whatsoever to answer readers' qury.
