Dear O'Reilly & Associates,
I have never been compelled to write such an email before but I have recently finished your "Programming Jakarta Struts" written by Chuck Cavaness and wish to provide you with some feedback on it.
Firstly, let me say that I am hugely disappointed with this book. I have long been a fan of your books, having read many Java and web development titles e.g. Enterprise JavaBeans by Monson-Haefel, anything by Brett McLaughlin, all of which were superb. In fact, I think I have about 15 O'Reilly titles in my technical library.
It therefore came as a great shock to come across a technical book which is completely lacking in useful examples, and indeed seems to be nothing more than a rewrite of the Struts documentation which is available freely with the Struts distribution itself. The Struts documentation is already famously sketchy.
The book introduces a "Storefront" example but fails to delve into the details of what would be a useful example application. There are practically NO examples of the Struts tags (granted, developers should probably be using JSTL anyway. But I digress.)
I believe that many chapters in this book are completely irrelevant to a developer wanting to build a Struts application. Chapter 13 which deals with EJB is a complete waste of book space. Ditto chapters 12, 15, 16 and 17. In all fairness, does an entire chapter on "logging" really belong in a book on this topic?
I have since read some reviews (Amazon etc.) of "Programming Jakarta Struts" thinking perhaps that I have missed the point of this book. But I have found that many people share my view.
I think the Struts framework is excellent, but I've found developing Struts applications using your book as a reference, to be a very frustrating experience. My opinion of O'Reilly books has not diminished but I will be exercising more caution in future.
Many thanks for your time and keep up the (otherwise) good work.
C Maguire
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