IMHO one important objective of JSP 2.0 consist in trying to eliminate the use of JSP scripts (declarations, expressions and scriptlets), so developers will be forced to reuse components and write programs that are easier to maintain. This can only be reached with the use of EL, functions, JSTL and optionally the new custom tags.
Volume 1 only introduces EL; JSTL, custom tags and functions(?) would be in volume 2. So, does volume 1 teach readers this concept, I mean, does it focus on teach how to write "scriptless" pages?
My opinion is that there are a variety of different styles of JSP development. As long as people use helper classes and are very restrained, I do not think it is always wrong on all projects to have small amounts of
Java code in some JSP pages.
So, to answer your question, no: Volume 1 of the book does
not present only scriptless pages. There are chapters that discuss the classic JSP scripting elements, and there are only three chapters that have only scriptless pages (the chapter on using JavaBeans, the chapter on MVC, and the chapter on the JSP 2.0 expression language).
Cheers-
- Marty