As background, before reading this book I had many years of web development experience, including a few years of Struts and ASP.NET development.

This book is not simply a reference, as it starts off as a programmers' guide. The book begins with a "hello, world" type of application. Where it shines is in giving very specific instructions for getting that simple application up and running - such as what jar files to download and where to put them. From there, trying out the examples on your own is very simple.

The book is very well organized, and thorough. After covering the basics of JSF, it gets into the gory details of writing your own JSF components. It then provides a reference of the standard JSF components and the MyFaces components.

One minor complaint is that some of the text covering the basics is verbose and somewhat redundant. But, if you are new to web development and the Model-View-Controller pattern, the wordiness might be helpful.

Very well done.

Very good book for novice and professionals, the book provide all details about JSF framework programming !!!

The book has very good coverage, my only complaint is that explanations are too long. I think the whole book can be condensed into 100-200 pages.

I bought this book because it's the best-seller for JavaServer Faces according to Amazon and I don't like it that much. I've been reading a lot of Computer books lately, and a lot of them are surprisingly well written and fun to read. This one is not. The writing is less than stellar and it doesn't have the dorky humor that other computer books have.

On the plus side, I am learning a lot from this book and I don't have much to compare it to as far as other JSF references. It's the most up-to-date one when I bought it, which is important since it's still an evolving framework.

The book goes over all the stuff in JSF and explains in a very clear language exactly whats happening under the hood of JSF. I have also some other JSF books and this is by far the best.