W. Chong said
The book is rich in content and you can definitely learn a lot about JSF. Unfortunately, a good author also needs to be a good teacher and story teller. Reading Bergsten is like listening to Ben Stein or Stephen Hawking talk, you will undoubtedly wish you were doing anything else except this. Things such as changing a diaper or jury duty will become more appealing after reading this book. I stopped once during reading and decided to clean my room instead. That's exactly how exciting it was to read Bergsten.
To give a contrary example, Kevin Yank from sitepoint or Joe Burns from HTMLGoodies are infinitely more fluid and entertaining to read. If you want a book for its content, this is a good book. If you have a crappy attention span like myself, this is a difficult book to read. To give a bit of background on myself (not that anybody cares) I've been a Java programmer for about 6 years so the book isn't above me, its just too dry in my opinion. That's my two cents. Good Luck and Happy Shopping!
Kelby Zorgdrager said
This book is an "OK" starting point for someone learning JSF.
Here are some things to be aware of:
1) Does a poor job explaining the lifecycle of a JSF component; he writes the sequence of events out in paragraph style and does not provide diagrams (UML or otherwise) to help with the illustration
2) Constantly switches metaphors as he is explaining JSF; sometimes he will be talking about the implementation view of a JSF component and then other times he will be talking about the application view of a component. It would be better if there were one or two chapters that focused on the "how the heck does this work behind the scenes" and the rest of the book focused on applying JSF.
3) There are syntax errors throughout the examples; this includes the code examples (.jsp examples) and the configuration examples (web.xml and faces-config.xml). To his credit, he constantly references the appendix section for a more complete example. As a reader, I personally don't like flipping back and forth all the time.
4) His coverage of the application (using JSF actions) is very basic (academic). He doesn't go through the academically classified edge-cases, which is disapppointing because those are typically classified as real-world.
5) He forward references way too much; for example he will talk about / use something in say chapter 4, and then states something to the effect "oh, we'll come back to that later, don't worry about it now". From a learning perspective this is terrible. It causes your train of thought to be derailed and you end up asking yourself the question "what does that do?".
On the positive side, the flow does seem to make some sense from a learning perspective. He builds on the foundational concepts and frames the learning in the context of creating a "real-world" application.
I understand this book is a bit out of date (suprises me O'R hasn't encouraged an update). My suggestion is to buy this book used.
Jonathan D. Simms said
I've been working on webapps for the past 3 years in PHP, Python, and most recently Ruby. I've been trying to learn J2EE and have found it very difficult to find a foothold, a solid piece of ground to get oriented as to how people write Java webapps. I tend to like tutorial-style books when learning a new subject, ones that pick a project and implement it step by step, explaining the importance and contextual relevance of each hunk of code along the way. Of the four or five J2EE books that I've read on O'Reilly's Safari, this book is by far the best one for my style of learning. Java webapps are unique in that there is such a wide variety of options for each layer of your application. The Model, View, and Controller layers are all completely independent, and the interfaces between them are all configurable. Not only are they configurable, but you can choose to implement the connections between layers in code, or by using xml configuration files. This is *very* different to any other framework that I've used, and the complexity and power it presents is immensely overwhelming.
Bergsten does an excellent job (in contrast to the Official J2EE Tutorial, imho) at presenting each concept with just enough background, context, and detail as is necessary for one to understand what is happenening at a given moment.
I really like the fact that all of the code is listed in its entirety in the text, with descriptions interspersed. I really dislike the style of tutorial that tells you to "download and install the source code" and then proceeds to discuss it. I find that by having the example provided to me, I tend to skip over the boring, but important, details and at the end of the read, I haven't retained much. I learn by "following along" and typing in the listings myself. It helps me to remember the concepts, and forces me to concentrate on what's happening.
I can't speak for how effective this book would be for someone who already knew J2EE in some capacity, but for me, a J2EE newbie who likes a hands-on, applied approach, this book was the perfect fit.
S. Peterson said
I have this book and Core Javaserver Faces; this is the book that lies open on the desk, is dog eared, and has coffee spills on it. It's not perfect, but it's the best there is in this space.
A.S. Pushkin said
1/4 of the book goes explains how to use JSP, JSTL
2/4 of the book API reprint
1/4 of the book actual JSF stuff - not real world related - unless you know exactly what you are looking for you'll never find it...
i'm surprised this book went into print - probably somebody upstairs decided to have at least something rather than nothing.
waste of time and money.
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