Review by Billy Barron, Tek-tools
"Professional JSP, 2nd Edition" (ISBN 1-861004-95-8, Wrox Press) by lots of people is obviously one of those multi-author books. This kind of books tend to be very uneven, but let's take a look at this one.
I rarely do any JSP work. I talked to my co-workers who do it all the time. They had good things to say about the first edition of this book. This book is up to date covering JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.3.
After the usual intro, the book covers the basics of Servlets and JSPs. Then it moves into JavaBeans and the Model 2 architecture though they call it MVC. It also covers some other design approaches as well.
Then the book has several chapters on custom tags. This is followed by material on XML and JDBC. The book also has some chapters on the new filtering part of the Servlet API. The rest of the book is a scattershoot of different materials.
The Title of the book is a little misleading as this is as much a Servlet book as it is a JSP book. Out of all the JSP books I've seen to date this one has the most through coverage.