<pre>
Author/s : Sue Spielman
Publisher : Morgan Kaufmann
Category : Servlets, JSP and Tag Libraries
Review by : Matthew Phillips
Rating : 9 horseshoes</pre>
This might be one of the most effective IT book I have ever read. It's short but comprehensive. All four libraries are covered and covered quite well.
The first few chapters provide an introduction to JSTL, including the reasons and a few brief examples. The chapter on the EL seemed to be the weakest chapter, but it was detailed enough to get a solid start with using it.
Each library has a pretty good sized chapter with coverage of all of the tags and their most common attributes. The code samples covered what you are most likely to do with the tags, although I would have like to see some uncommon uses as well.
The only negative was the sample code that I downloaded from the site. Although the book states that it was tested with
Tomcat 4.1.20 and Tomcat 5.0. In both cases, I had problems with Tomcat validating the web.xml file. A few simple changes and the code was up and running, though.
Overall, this book provides a quick source of information for learning JSTL.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk