Advanced JavaServer Pages by David M. Geary (Prentice Hall )

<pre>Authors : David M. Geary
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Category : J2EE & Distributed Computing
Review by : Thomas Paul - Bartender, October 2001
Rating : 9 horseshoes</pre>
The basics of JSP are easy to learn for anyone familiar with HTML and Java but it is difficult to learn the many advanced features. This book covers the complexities of JSP very well and helps to make them simple and easy to understand.
The book starts with coverage of JSP custom tags, one of the most important features of JSP. HTML forms and JSP templates are covered next. The section on templates is extremely useful for those who wish to use pluggable components to build web sites. The best part of the book for me were the middle chapters which cover designing a Model 2 framework using servlets and JSP. The framework is generic and can be applied to any web site development effort. He then demonstrates how event handling can be used within the framework to provide internationalization, authentication, and form resubmission trapping. (Have your users ever created additional profiles by using the back button?) The next chapter demonstrates using custom tags to access databases. The author then shows different ways to process XML with JSP. The final chapter is a case study demonstrating all the techniques used throughout the book.
Code samples are found throughout the book and I had no trouble getting any of them to run in Tomcat. The tag libraries are provided as open source by the author and will be helpful for most developers. The book is very well written and will be useful for anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of JSP.
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[This message has been edited by Johannes de Jong (edited December 05, 2001).]