MySQL and JSP Web Applications: Data-Driven Programming Using Tomcat and MySQL
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 3.5Customer Rating: 1
Summary: The Worst Technical Book I've Ever Bought
Comment: This is without a doubt the worst technical book I have ever bought.
Some of the problems stem from the fact that most of the packages used are now out of date. Case in point: the book walks through the installation & configuration of Turbine (which is used for connection pooling), unfortunately the connection pooling part of Turbine has now been branched off into another project (and Tomcat now includes standard J2EE connection pooling anyway).
The other major problem is that a nearly every instance of example code is either sloppy and badly edited, or in some cases plainly doesn't even work without serious debugging.
If you must buy this book, don't even think about trying to follow the core example application without first downloading the source-code from the authors website. You WILL be needing it, even if only to 'fill in the blanks' from the poor instructions, and to help find the coding errors.
In conclusion, I would never recommend this book to anyone - even another experienced programmer trying to add JSP/Servlets to their repertoire.
Do yourself a favour, buy Murach's book instead.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Why would anyone give this book 5 stars
Comment: I have read this book from cover to cover and used many of the examples in some of my development. There are errors in the editing to be sure. For the most part most are minor e.g. links that end with .htm instead of .html will not work or if you create the database in mySQL, in my case on a Linux platform there are errors you will run into. These errors are limited to making sure you observe the case of the letters in creating and quering your database. This book is not for the beginner. It teaches a systematic approach to building an ecommerce web site using jsp's and mysql. The reason for the 5 star rating is this book makes you go out of the box to learn ant, turbine and other opensource packages to build a working e-commmerce web site. Personally I do not like to put java code int an html page = jsp's ... but this book offers sound eamples and good advice. One of the better practical but certainly not perfect books I've bought.
Customer Rating: 1
Summary: Poorly edited
Comment: I was encouraged when I first started reading this book, but soon I grew disappointed. The book is peppered with useful tips here and there, but in general it's too linear, as an earlier review mentioned. The book is more of a recipe for a web app than a general guide, and it wastes too much space on design process. But worse than that, it is fraught with errors, as if edited by someone who didn't understand the material. Letters have been dropped from words, referenced figures don't show what the referencing text says, there are errors in XML examples. A funny example is on the "In This Chapter" sidebar on the opening page of Chapter 2 where one of the bullet items is "Bean Resistence". More power to the beans! He meant "Bean Persistence", but hey, if you're going to get it wrong, at least spell it right. :)