Professional Apache Tomcat 5 (Programmer to Programmer)

Very inconsistent from chapter to chapter Some of the chapters in this I found very useful e.g. class loaders, and some I found to be very bad e.g. JDBC. It seems that the book really needed to have someone not familiar with the subject matter give it a review as it was very common to mention a concept several times in a paragraph that had not been explained previously in the book/chapter. In at least one case the object was not explained until several chapters further into the book. Some sections at least reference that an explanation is forthcoming in the next few pages and that allows to reader to just wait fort hat to come. Some of the call-out tables are completely pointless, e.g. they `explain' all the possible arguments ends up reading like "switch -allow_JDBC description - allows access to JDBC". If you can add no value beyond the switch name, why waste the paper. The security chapter says it is a perfectly secure practice to give developers read only access to production databases; statements like this should be qualified to reference the type of data that is being stored. If the SysAdmins of Amazon followed these practices and my name, address, credit card, password etc. were available to the entire organization I would not be pleased. I am sure that is not the case with Amazon as that would be an issue for SOX as well as PCI. I am about 2/3rds of the way through the book now, and if I had known it would be this bad I would have abandoned it earlier, I am now far enough in that I do not think it is worth starting fresh with an O'Reily book. This book gets two stars from me as I had some real `a-haaaa' moments reading it, my issues is many of the chapters feel like they were shoved in without proper care, and certainly without a proper independent review. I have now descended to scrawling notes on the book at the pieces that are clearly incorrect, items that say something can be done three ways without discussing the benefits / risks of each, tables / diagrams that do not match the text used to explain them, and the grammatical errors. I am not a nit-picking person, I am sure my review is full of grammatical, spelling issues etc., but the point of a text book is you pay close attention while trying to commit these things to your brain, and the number of errors in the last couple of chapters I have been reading are such that I can not stay focused on the material.