Professional Java XML Programming with servlets and JSP

Author: Alexander Nakhimovsky, Tom Myers, Thomas J. Myers List Price: $49.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: B0000B0T0X Publisher: Wrox Press Inc (December, 1999) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 1,534,443 Average Customer Rating: 2.65 out of 5

Buy now directly from Amazon.com -

Customer Reviews

If you invested in a DOT COM company in 1999 and you did not sell your stocks on time, you may have lost 99% of your money. If you bought this book (published in 1999), you probably lost all your money, because the book is really, really H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E.

1.The book title is "Professional Java XML Programming with Servlets and JSP" but you will neither learn XML nor Servlets/JSPs. Wrox publication tried to place it in the XML space but there is no so much XML to learn about... The book contains 772 pages but only 185 pages discuss XML. The authors were busy discussing Servlets, JDBC, XSLT XHTML etc... I was looking in the Index section, maybe I could find a good Home Insurance, as well...

2.Strategically, the book discusses two main XML parsers, DOM and SAX. Unfortunately, the authors chose to dedicate a larger portion of their discussion to the SAX parser. Most companies are using the DOM parser because of its extended capabilities, such as the ability to store tag data in a tree structure, provides better searching and better performance. The SAX parser is flat and lacks such capabilities.

The Internet Bubble created an inflation of bad books. I hope that in the future, publishers would put more attention to quality rather than to quantity.

As a professional Java programmer who has used all of the tachnologies in this book, I find that there are some good concepts here in terms of high-level OO design. Unfortunately, the organization of the book requires you to read through a lot of superfluous verbiage to get to the meat.

The criticisms mentioned in other reviews are valid and I won't repeat them here, except to reiterate that the author's academic roots do shine through on this book. The tone is written as if you were sitting in a lecture hall with all the time in world to discuss these concepts and the code examples are not written for performance or high volume traffic on a web site. As a Java professional who writes almost exclusively on the server-side, I found this iritating. There isn't enough time to wade through this book to get what you need when a project is due.