The Teach Male, 42, It's complicated. Chiavari, Italy

Don't be fooled from the good reviews this book has gotten. this book is the WRONG choice for anyone willing to LEARN about web services in Java. It is merely a boring, dry, wordy, repetive, confusing (and confused) compilation of web-services related topics.
The authours might be good programmers maybe, but as they are clearly very poor technical authors.. their writing style is boring, excessively wordy and abstruse.
Not clear and concise enough to be useful as a reference and absolutely terrible as a tutorial.
The preface tells how the idea of writing this book came form one of the authors who, sitting in a pub with the others was the the only one who wasn't drinking. I have some advice for this guy: start drinking.

Written in the now familiar light and funny style of the Head First Series, this text is also extremely precise, clear, correct and informative. Be warned though, tit has the wrong title. (that's why I give it 4 star instead of 5). It should be called
Head First SCWCD and not Head First Servlets & JSP, since the scope of this text is to prepare you for the SCWCD exam, and it succeeds in that brilliantly. As a first book to learn Servlets & JSP programming though, I think it is a terrible, if funny, book.
In fact it is very good on conceptual matters and especially on the tricky casees and questions that you might encounter in the exam, but it lacks the hands on and by example approach necessary to learn how to actually DO things.
This said, it is still a great book if you intend to refresh or improve your Servlet and JSP knowledge, or to actually take the exam and get certified.
Only , please, enough with this style, let's find another funny one, if I read another Java book with martial arts characters in it I will feel sick ! ;)

This is certainly not your "classic" fantasy book. Action, adventure wonder and breathtaking scenery are definitely missing, and even the characters are quite "run of the mill". It' s more of a "philosophical" book who tells the story of a sligthly fantastic and very simple world. And here' s the catch: this book actually has a charm of its on, is written in a very fluid way, and can be even somewhat inspiring, but it 's overall too simplistic and superficial. The characters, the world, the ideals, the morals, the drama end up feeling fake and shallow compared to what real existence is. It has a value though, like a little. light, fresh flute musical diversion.

How can a book published in 2005 be about Visual Basic 6?
Helloooo! VB 6 is dead! Not supported anymore. Learning it now is a total waste of time, even for a teen. The author should have written
a game programming book in VB.NET 2005, but I guess he, not being very young, is still stuck in his old habits and doesn't t have the proficiency to do it. Don't waste your time with stuff that belongs to the past, especially if you are young!
And just to confirm this, you VB6 dinos who are defending this book, a new edition is coming out now (2007) finally dealing with VB.NET. Wonder why if VB6 is so alive and well.... Anyhow, better late then never!

Warning: this book is only a rumination on the J2EE web services specification, fat on "theory" and with absolutely no real code examples you can run and play with to learn. Unless you are someone who can learn playing tennis looking at people playing it, or become a musician by listening to music, I doubt you can become a web services developer by just reading words and code snippets.
As the author says: "this book doesn't attempt to cover installation, configuration, or deployment except in terms of standard J2EE requirements". I do believe that a decent tech book must have running code to support its explanations and support its value and usefulness. With this text Monson-Haefel is well on his way to win the "Most useless java book of the year" award.

An excellent intro to programming from an outstanding author and programmer. It keeps reasonably upto date with the latest java version and presentation trends (pages are so full of color that reading it reminds me of a kid's birthday party.. personally I hate it, but it seems that's the current fashion..). My only problem with this book is its price and outrageous selling strategy. This book, as well as Big C++ and Big Java sell for 80 to 90 bucks in the US, where they can be imposed to college students as textbooks. Here in Italy, where this trick can't work they sell for their real value, that is from 40 to 50 bucks.
So, exploiting the enthusiasm of the student buying his new textbooks (I know how it feels I have been there myself) or just the plain fact that it can be imposed as required reading in some classes this text is oversold at almost double its real market value. I find this disgusting. Unless you are forced to adopt this text, go for a maybe less academical and colorful book (but reasonably priced ) by the same author, Core Java.

I don' t recommend buying this book, since it is just a printout of the JBoss Guide freely available on JBoss site. Given the speed at which JBoss evolves you would soon find yourself with a stale documentation snapshot. Besides, the low quality of this documentation doesn' t really deserve a hard copy. I admire the JBoss team for their work and their intuition in supporting and adopting the most promising and advanced technologies, like Hibernate and AOP. Frankly, I don' t understand why they don't make the little effort of employing a few professional trainers to create top class documentation and tutorials. It would greatly push JBoss into the market as most potential JBoss adoptees are pushed back by the lack of way to become skilled and confident at using this server. It would not harm their certification revenues , given that to pass the exam you HAVE to take the class.
Anyways, this text as other as noted is an arid, barely coherent, messy agglomerate of dtds, schemas, example code and superficial explanations. Not deep enough for the wanna be JBoss developer and not clear and detailed enough for the JBoss programmer or administrator.
It is just the typical product you would expect when the project manager tells his average Joe programmer : "Hey I know this sucks but we need documentation for our framework in one week so try to put something together".
I really wish the JBoss team will understand soon that clear documentation and engaging tutorials are the heart of a successful project. Meanwhile, save your money for something else.

This is a very clear, concise introduction to the Struts framework.
It' s up to date, and present the subject with a learn-by-example strategy. I appreciated the fact that the various aspects of Struts are presented with many little independend manageable examples intead of the typical "example application" that many book use to "put it all together". Overall an excellent text to understand the whys and hows of Struts. Be warned you will not find material on the more sophisticated aspects and usages of Struts, but a good foundation upon which you can build with working experience and more advanced books like "Struts Recipes". Anyhow you can just make up your mind by going to jtutedotcom and checking the entire book online!

Great book on JSF, the absolute best intro to JSF in the concise, terse, classical style of Horstmann & Geary. You can buy any book by these two dudes with your eyes shut. I would have loved to see more new material in this second edition, especially on Seam and EJB integration in general. The book being so similar to the first edition there is little need for you to buy it if you already own the previous one.
The chapter on custom JSF tag development will be well over your head if you are reading the book as a first intro to JSF, and the LDAP material is pretty brutal and useless for a newbie to the subject, the chapter on opens source miscellanous frameworks is way too sparse to be useful beyond a little inspiration to learn more, but the rest of the book is top notch and will greatly help you to understand the JSF framework deep down to the bone.
The monkey wrenching title is not really about the book but about my feelings towards the development of java web development (forgive the horrible pun). First there were servlets, then JSP then EJB then Struts then JSF then Seam then Facelets then Shale...Am I the only one who feels that stacking framework over framework is going definitely overboard and leading us to do "frankenstein programming"? (omg I think I am starting to blog.. pls stop me! ;)

This book has some of the good qualities of a typical Wrox title: code centered, clear layout, step-by-step practical approach, but has clearly been published without even the shadow of a technical review. My guss is the book was rushed and not really invested into because "the hibernate book" (by Gavin King) was looming on the horizon. The publisher would have shown much more business sense if it had taken time for a really solid book on Hibernate 3. The amount of typos and inaccuracies both in the text and in the code is staggering. Several interesting subjects are mentioned, like AspectJ and Design Patterns, but in a too superficial way to be of any real help. Gradecki, I hope you have not really co-authored this but just supplied the AspectJ chapter...

For those who are still interested in dear old lean and mean C++ in these days of Java and C# this is an excellent second book (assuming the first was a good one ;) If you have mastered the basics of C++ this book will gently introduce you to the power of the Sandard Template Library teaching you how to use vector, list, deque and all the other containers and how to manipulate them with STL algorithms. You will also get a tutorial on how to extend STL. Written by a master of the language, it has a clean, efficient, lean and mean style... just like C++.
(answer to the title question.. no, it's not, not even close :P

Publishing one bad game development book wasn't enough for this author, he had to try to do worse...and finally succeded! Here's the typical example of a "game development" rip-off book. Some amateurish programmer with no deep and solid game programming knowledge and absolutely no clue about how to effectively teach the little he knows has been playing around trying to implement his little game. Realizing his work is no good he stumbles upon the idea that he could scrap up a few bucks writing a book on what he is unable to do. Unscrupulous publishers aren't hard to find it seems: the leading champion being Premier Press, who has been a road opener to publishing trash game development books (and a few good ones, probably by accident). Now Wordware seems to have happily joined in the business...inside this book you will find countless pages in which the author passionately reminisces about his teenager gaming habits, some general considerations about gaming and programming, and quite a few irritating jokes.And yes there is some working code coming with the book, but lost in his blabbering the author gives to it just a passing look and very shallow coverage. I understand that plastering a book with source code might not be the best tactic to teach programming, but exlaining only 5% of the code you present is even worse ...but certainly quicker and easier. That this peace of junk made it to the press is unbeliavable, and that its price was $40 is outrageous. My advice: stay clear from this title and from the upcoming (inevitable I guess) books from the same author.