First I must say that I normally love O'reilly's books. I have read lots of your books and they have always been great. That's why I bought this book without even looking for reviews. This was a huge mistake since this book is the worst book I have ever read!
The problem is that I don’t understand who the book is for? It's not a book to use when you want to learn Struts since the book doesn't progress (the forth chapter is a full description of the configuration file for instance, and by then you don't have a clue what all options mean). So after reading this book I had to turn to other resources to learn how Struts really works. So it wasn’t for first times, maybe it works as a reference? No, I’m sorry! Chapter 8 is a good example, here the author lists some of the tags available in Struts but I don't know how these tags are selected. The form-tag is described but the text-tag isn't. What good is it to know how the form works if you don’t know how to create a text field?
The reason that I write this review right now is that I just started my second project with Struts and since I had forgotten some of it since the last time I turned to this book again. After a while I was really annoyed about it and turned to the web page to see if someone else was experiencing the same problems. I was very surprised to see that the average rating was FOUR! I looked a little closer and realized that the author himself was the author of 32 reviews, and this really annoyed me!!!
My suggestion to everybody who is looking for a Struts book is, don't buy this book. My suggestion to O'reilly is, stop selling this book and write a new. This book have really damaged you reputation (at least in my company and among my friends).
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