Howdy -- you really should put "Beer-v1" inside the webapps directory, not at the tomcat root!
You want to make sure that everything is organized correctly. It's VERY tricky to make sure that everything everywhere is spelled absolutely perfectly, or it won't work.
Remember, in the development environment in the book we named the directory "beerV1", and in the deployment directory it is named "Beer-v1" (we wanted to make sure they were different so that you wouldn't mistake one for the other), so check the capitalization and spelling carefully. The way it is laid out in the chapter will definitely work assuming everything is setup exactly as it is in the book, and if you get tomcat working, then you shouldn't have to do any additional configuration.
The only issues you will have are for compiling, where you need to adjust your shell syntax to match your specific shell, and of course your environment variables.
It is NOT trivial to get this working, because a 404 error isn't exactly helpful
in pointing out what could be wrong, but I urge you to follow the tutorial instructions in the book EXACTLY as they are, or else it will be even harder to troubleshoot, and putting things in ROOT is not a good solution.
Try not to get frustrated. I think the first time I tried to deploy a webpp in Tomcat it took me about two days to get everything exactly right. But if you use an
ANT script, for example, that does it all for you (which is great once you really understand what its doing and you're in real world development), you won't be nearly as clear about how it is all supposed to be setup. So for both the exam and your ability to learn it, you really should do this all by hand until you get it right.
Hang in there... it could be worse
It could be
EJB...
cheers,
Kathy