Title:  Jakarta Struts Cookbook
Author: Bill Siggelkow
Publisher: O'Reilly Median Inc.
ISBN: 0-596-00771-X
Reviewer: Gordon Haverland
Pages: 487

Publisher's Description: The Jakarta Struts Cookbook is an amazing
collection of code solutions to common--and uncommon--problems encountered
when building web applications with the Struts Framework. With solutions
to real-world problems just a few page flips away, this quick, look-up
reference is perfect for independent developers, large development teams,
and everyone in between who wishes to use the Struts Framework to its
fullest potential.

TOC:
1. Getting Started: Enabling Struts Development
2. Configuring Struts Applications
3. User Interface
4. Tables, Sorting, and Grouping
5. Processing Forms
6. Leveraging Actions
> 7. Execution Control
8. Input Validation
9. Exception and Error Handling
10. Connecting to the Data
11. Security
12. Internationalization
13. Testing and Debugging
14. Tiles and Other Presentation Approaches

Reviewer Background: An accomplished programmer who is interested in
developing a Model-View-Controller (MVC) type web application. Has never
programmed in Java, and is wondering if Struts is a reason to learn.

Content Type: This is a cookbook, it is intended to show you ways of
accomplishing various tasks related to a dynamic or MVC web application.

Content Level: This book will work best with people who know java and have
an application in mind.  It also involves a fair amount of miscellaneous
Javascript and HTML, which is true of whatever language the web
application is written in.  It is of less use to knowledgable programmers
who don't happen to know Java (but do know Perl, Ruby, etc.).

Features: Lots of code examples.

Style: It's a cookbook of methods to solve specific problems.  The
knowledgable user may be able to leverage these to related problems (or
other programming languages).

This book purports to cover Struts-1.2.  I would suggest that if any
Struts users are buying this book, that they either be running version
1.2, or intend to convert older Struts applications to version 1.2.
There looks to be sufficient "problems" with older versions of Struts,
that they really shouldn't be running these older versions.

For those people who are running dynamic or MVC websites in other
languages, you probably should look over this book for the Javascript and
HTML expertice which is in it.

One thing I was looking for, was the answer to the question, "Is this the
Java application for which I should start learning Java?".  I do not think
that Jakarta Struts is sufficiently better than other frameworks I am
familiar with, to warrant learning Java.

This book seems to cover most of the problems I would think would show up
in producing a dynamic or MVC website.  It also explains the whys and hows
quite well for these cases.  For the Java programmer, I would say this is
a good book.