The authors do not know how to write a tutorial for new Struts 2 users. If you are very new to Struts, this book will confuse you and tell you nothing valuable.
The authors may be experts of Struts, however, they do not know how to guide a novice to learn struts from beginning. They omitted so much content which is very necessary to beginners. If you know struts very well, you may understand what they are talking about, but why do you want this book if you are already an expert ? Therefore, this book is garbage for anybody.

I already have used Struts 2 years ago. Now i swithced to RAILS (eeeeeeasy), but a week ago a client has a request for a Struts app: well, i decided it was time to increase my knowledge over this popular framework. I've started to look for something fast-readable that allow me to skip the info i alredy know and that strikes me in the face with pro techniques i never used.
I've found two books very interesting: one is The Struts Survival Guide (not for beginner but full of interesting patterns) and the other is this one.
While this book is not a PRO book, it lets you discover its contents with absolutely no effort: when i looked for a topic i don't know (or remember) i found the info i'm looking for and immediatly i'm able to test it in my application.
I strongly recomand this book, well... i give it 5 stars only to raise the avarage rating (1 star rating is nonsense to me...), maybe the right rating is 4...

This book has virtually no useful information to get you past the "novice" part. More importantly, there iis little practical information.

This is the first "complete" struts book I've bought and was extremely dissapointed. I have completely given up using it for any kind of reference or solution. The O'Reilly Jakarta Struts pocket reference provides more information that this waste of a tree.

Doray gives you a good and very detailed explanation about programming in Apache Struts. He points out upfront that Struts sits roughly midway in functionality between PHP and Ajax, where in going from PHP to Ajax, we are moving in the direction of increasing desktop functionality. This will be useful to some readers, in helping to determine if Struts is a suitable choice for your project.

Plus, the book shows how the powerful Model-View-Controller division of functionality can be done in Struts. If you have never used MVC before, in any context, then learning it here is inherently useful, irrespective of Struts. Also, MVC is an example of a design pattern; perhaps one of the most important. The concept of an abstract design pattern is also of vital importance to a programmer.

There are some minor issues with the text. Another reviewer pointed out that Chapter 2 refers to "WebLogic from IBM". Opps! More seriously, Chapter 4 refers repeatedly to loading code from a CD-ROM. What CD-ROM is this? Did I miss its definition earlier in the book? Or was there a definition?

Another limitation is the restriction to Java 1.4. Increasingly awkward as time goes on, if not right now, because Java 1.5 has been out for over a year. We can expect more Java programmers to migrate to 1.5, and new programmers to start at 1.5. (Or subsequent versions.) One immediate consequence of the restriction to 1.4 is given in Chapter 2, where it advises you to install Tomcat. But you should not use any version higher than 5.0.x, because those use Java 1.5. This ceiling on Tomcat is not desirable either, as new versions of this often come out, and Tomcat has been at 5.5 for some time.

Java 1.5 is essentially a superset of 1.4. It is unclear why the text restricts itself to 1.4. That should be explained in more detail. Better yet would be to remove the restriction.

I came across this book in a bookshop and browsed through it.

I am surprised to find a glaring mistake in chapter 2 (chapter 1 is only 7 pages long). In the beginning few paragraphs of chapter 2, it briefly described serlvet container and mentioned one of the popular serlvet containers is WebLogic from IBM. WebLogic is not from IBM.

I stopped browsing furthur.