Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects (Practical Projects)

I really liked this book. I am already a user of Spring, Hibernate, JUnit and Velocity. For this reason I found the integration of Struts2 with these very useful. I can see where others not versed in these may find it a little difficult, but the sample uses of these technologies are pretty simple and straightforward. Therefore, new users of these technologies may have to spend some extra time in Chapter 4 to familiarize themselves with these technologies and how Struts2 works with them. I started using Maven2 with this book and it was a very useful jumpstart into Maven2. I also use Eclipse and MyEclipse and was able to use Maven2 to create eclipse projects (mvn eclipse:eclipse) for each chapter and follow along by stepping through and changing the code in MyEclipse by running the war file (mvn package) in the built-in Tomcat web server. Also, I am not an experienced user of Struts 1. I have working knowledge of Struts 1 having been involved in a project where I had to make some enhancements. But I didn't have a problem learning Struts2 with very little knowledge of Struts 1 using this book. My only problem has been getting the Persistence rollback to work in the JUnit tests. Still trying to figure that out, but I have been able to work around this. Some of the concepts and details used in the example code aren't fully discussed in the book. However, I have been able to study those by looking at the sample code. I would recommend this book to those that are already familiar with the Spring framework, Hibernate, JSPs and J2EE. It's an excellent jumpstart into Struts2 if you're familiar using those technologies.