Rating: 

I bought this book essentially because I know a fair amount about JSPs and servlets, but wanted to research i18n, security, the jstl and the new 2.4 stuff. I also wanted the kind of tips and tricks that cookbooks normally provide in abundance.

While it provides a reasonable guide to pretty much everything, it certainly does not stand on its own - you WILL need to supplement it with other books or internet resources. For example, I needed to access the elements of a HashMap using the JSTL <forEach> tag - but while the cookbook tells you the basics of the syntax, it doesn't tell you how you access the name/value pairs specific to this type. Conversely, however, it provides rather simple and vendor-specific chapters like "Deploying an individual JSP on Tomcat".

I think a little less boilerplate text and a bit more information would make this a killer book. As it is, it is certainly useful, but I would not recommend it as the one book to buy on this topic.