Thanks. The book is finally doing pretty well.
Struts book doing well: Professional Struts:
For a while the first edition of our Struts book was outselling the second edition. It sure did not help that the first edition was under a Wiley imprint and the second edition was under a Wrox imprint, and they changed the name of the book. My understanding is that Wiley bought the rights to Wrox name and their best selling books when Wrox went out of business. Now the book is third on Amazon (out of all Struts books), which is not too bad considering the Orielly's book and Ted Husted's book are number 1 and 2.
For a while, the book was second on bookpool right after the Orielly book, which blows my mind. Now the book is no longer second on book pool, it is has dropped. This could be because bookpool is out of stock! Come on. WHY!? Print more! Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
You may wonder why I care. Mainly, if I am going to spend time writing a book, I want people to read it. Perhaps this is vain. James Goodwill was the primary author, and he has a very good writing style, which I mostly adopted. (I wrote the best practices chapter, built-in actions chapter, validator framework chapter, and the tiles chapter).
The biggest complaint about the book seems to be that it does not cover Linux installation. Hey, if you can not translate the Windows instructions to Linux instruction in your head, then you probably should not be using Linux. We expect more from Java/Linux developers.
What I think really differentiates the book from other books is the step-by-step instructions, which is great for reference or Struts novices.
We cover the steps. Then we should the code for each step, explaining the step along the way. We wrote the book the way we like technical books written.
I sure wish JavaRanch would feature this book.
I am a regular to the JavaRanch Struts forum, and could use the plug!