The word "Beginning" in the title is optimistic at best. I would not recommend this book for someone new to JSP. I've made it through 14 chapters, and now I'm going to drop this one and find something else. The last several chapters have been extremely frustrating. Too many examples don't work, and many things are not well explained. I've had to find other sources such as java.sun.com to find good explanations for things that are quickly passed over in this book. And I'm a certified J2SE programmer, so I'm not exactly a beginner.

The only IDE that has been mentioned so far is NetBeans 3.6. That's hopelessly out of date. The order of the chapters doesn't even make sense. An exercise in chapter 5 wants you to create and deploy an application, but nothing is mentioned about deployment until chapter 16!

And forget about asking questions on the P2P forums at the wrox website. They are effectively abandoned.

Overall, way too much reading for poor explanations, and poor exercises. You can find something better.

The book is extremly good, it explain everything about JSP and other new technologies, i really recomend it

I did learn a lot about JSP from this book. I learned how it works and the history of it. I did not, however, learn how to write JSP. This book touts hand-ons but their idea of hands-on is pasting several pages of code in the book and telling you to write it verbatim in your code. It goes over some good tools (such as Ant) but never mentions an IDE or what the best way to go about starting a project is. For the most part it moved very slowly and repeated its self a lot. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be. I do feel like I learned from this book but overall I don't think it was worth my time.

This book is the perfect complement to Marty Hall's Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages Vol. 1...."You wont be dissapointed with this book since almost everything is covered here from Servlets,JNDI,JDBC,JAXP and Java Mail....Plus the authors writing is absolutely beginner-friendly...If you want to learn the basics of java however this book is not for you...but then the power of Java really shines on Server-side programming...and plus the J2EE architecture is centered on JSP technology...I would recommend this to anyone who wishes to dwell into web-services programming...One downside i found however was the repetition of several topics such as XML and XSLT however provided with the fact that this is the culmination of several authors work i think with that said the repetition of topics can be forgiven...hell if ya already know the stuff from chapter 6 and its repeated on chapter 8 hell skip it...its that simple....highly recommended for JSP beginners and gurus alike

This is a hefty tome weighing in at 1262 pages. Wrox have a sound reputation for producing excellent programming titles, for programmers by programmers, and this latest offering does not disappoint.

From the onset, it is clearly an outstanding work with a solid emphasis on writing code properly. The book has lucid sections devoted to design patterns, testing, model-view architectures and many other important considerations in good software engineering. This is not just a "sequence, selection, repetition" work but one which distills obvious years of experience. Any reader can have confidence they will be not just a JavaServer Page (JSP) code cutter after finishing, but a good, professional, developer with a mastery of principles than transgress language boundaries.

The book is divided into four broad sections. Part one covers JSP fundamentals. Part two builds on this putting the JSP language knowledge into the framework of modern Web server software development, including coverage of servlets, security, performance and database integration. Part three puts it all together and shows how to build two complete real-world applications: a personalised portal, and an updateable, data-driven shopping cart site. Part IV concludes with appendices and exercise answers.

The book is not simply a standalone volume; Wrox have a hierarchy of Java titles which progress from beginning Java and JavaServer Pages through to advanced J2EE development. That said, this book can be entirely appreciated on its own and is comprehensive and complete in its coverage of JSP. It does not make any assumption of previous programming experience, but at the same time does not bog experienced programmers down with basic fundamentals.

The price is surprisingly reasonable for a book of this quality and size and consequently it is an indispensable purchase for anyone who wishes to develop server-side JSP apps.