"Inside Servlets, 2nd Edition: Server-Side Programming for the Java Platform" (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series; ISBN 0-201-70906-6) by Dustin Callaway is yet another book on Servlets. The market has several bad and largely obsolete servlet books on the market. Then there is Jason Hunter's book which is fine.

Since I have been doing Servlets for more than 2 years, I skipped over the basics. The book covers the basics of the Internet, Web, and then Servlets. It also covers 4 different Serlvet engines as well as debugging with 3 different environments.

I finally got interested in the book starting with Chapter 12 which covered thread-safety. The explanation on thread-safety even covered a couple of aspects I didn't know about. It is easily the best explanation of thread-safety with regards to Servlets that I have seen. The following chapters which cover Redirects, Cookies, States, Request Forwarding and many other topics are equally as good.

The last few chapters cover examples, the reference, and what is new in the 2.3 Serlvet API. It is followed by many useful appendices.

Since I got this book, I am going to get rid of all my other Servlet books with the possible exception of the Hunter book. This is by far and away the best Servlet book on the market in my opinion. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.