Good Intermediate JSP Book

This book will probably be most useful to someone who knows JSPs and servlets and has worked with them, and is looking for better or alternative ways of writing JSP applications.

The first two chapters provide a review of JSPs and an overview of web deployment. They include a nice JSP/MySQL example, with
instructions indicating how to build the MySQL database and incorporate into the JSP example using JDBC.

Chapters 3 and 4 include discussions and examples of how to use JavaBeans and custom tags. The JavaBean example shows how to handle the display of a large amount of data retrieved from a database.

The use of J2EE patterns is discussed in the next several chapters, as befitting a book with "best practices" in its title. The four patterns covered are the Decorating Filter, Front Controller, View Helper, and Dispatcher View.

The remainder of the book covers some topics that are not directly connected to JSPs, but may be useful in a wide range of software applications. These include regression testing, and the use of JUnit and JMeter; deployment, and Ant and CVS, as well as precompiling JSP pages; and application frameworks, including an example.

In short, the book includes a collection of topics not often found in a JSP book.

I noticed some minor quibbles, such as use of single-character variables and older break tags (rather than
),
but generally speaking I find the book to be quite informative and practical, especially in the discussions and use of open source software such as MySQL, JUnit, JMeter, and Ant, with JSPs.

Other Reviews

• Good Intermediate JSP Book
• The best book on JSP / Web application development
• Disappointing read
• Fills an important niche
• Not bad, but could be better