Very very good. But it's only a reference, not a design book.
I'm really happy I bought this book, even though I'd be happier if it was true what the title says: this book doesn't say anything about design.
It shows much about syntax and about what possibilities Struts 2 gives you, but if you aren't a good designer your designs won't still be good after reading this book. I know there are other good books about designing struts applications, this is not one of them.
Anyway, if you are looking for the best way to do something with struts 2, this book will show how in a technical view (take care from a design view).
Requires a bit of effort but there's a wealth of information in there
The book is for people who have a solid understanding of the servlet/JSP api. Some of the examples in the book require a little extra work on your part since the it does not layout every step. However if you do put the effort and go over the chapters thoroughly, you'll find that there's a wealth of information in here.
It's ALL meat...
This book is definitely not for a "casual read". What you'll find here is information written as if it were the design documentation for the Struts 2 project. EXTREMELY detailed, this will most likely be your troubleshooting guide and information resource whenever you work with or get stuck somewhere in the framework.
The author goes with a "no fluff" approach to the book and the 500+ pages are nothing but details, details, details (aka, meat). There's plenty in the book that you probably won't need/use more than once or twice; but when you do, you'll be glad to have this reference for the general lookup and troubleshooting the intricacies and details of Struts (I haven't had it long and I already found pieces that are contained within that are just blatantly missing from other texts).
The book really exposes Struts 2 and its inner workings. You will need to take what is there and completely rework it for you application (it's not a "copy-and-paste-from-me" book), but you will understand thoroughly what is happening under the covers.
This is also the first book I've read so far that covers the "default, no-config" option available in Struts 2. It's finally nice to have a reference that goes over the default information so that you aren't declaring everything explicitly until it works the way you want it to. You can just check this book out and figure out which parameters, constants, etc. you need to override/alter.
It's a heavy "general" read, but it's a wonderful, light reference.
The only reason I can't give it 5 stars is due to the overall formatting. The sections of the text are separated as if it were being displayed on a basic web page, wiki, etc. It just made narrowing down what's on the page to your specific needs a little harder than usual.
PS - don't let it's size fool you, it really is COMPLETELY packed
Its very good book
This is one of the good book for struts 2.0 in the release books. It gives the complete idea about the struts 2.0
Too Many Typos and Errors
The first thing I did was look up file uploading in Struts. The book's instructions are incorrect (a wrong method name is given). That cost me an hour of pointless debugging.
That initial experience, plus numerous typos and grammatical errors, do not inspire confidence. It's back to Amazon for this book.
It's a shame, because the author's tutorial approach is pretty good. A little proofreading would have gone a long way here.
