Tomcat 6 Developer’s Guide

This review is about Tomcat 6 Developer’s guide by Damodar Chetty from Packt Publishing.

Facts

1. 11 chapters, 395 pages, $44.99
2. This book covers how Tomcat works: Server,  Service, Connector, Valve, Pipeline, Engine, Host, Context, Wrapper and Manager won’t hold any secrets anymore
3. This book is intended for administrators that want to know how their product work and architects that need to bring additional functionnality into it

Pros

1. There’s not much details on Tomcat’s internals. The documentation on the site is enough for most uses, but sparse if one wants to really dive into the details. This book is a real wealth of information on how Tomcat really works.
2. Most of Tomcat’s oriented books talk about tuning or security. Very few detail how to create new components: this book is one of them
3. Before each explanation into a configuration element, the book takes the time to remind the pertinent stuff of the Servlet specifications and to link it with the following explanation

Cons

1. The information is raw and dense. Since drawings and schemas take another route into our brain, more graphical sources of explanation would have been an asset

Conclusion

This book is reference documentation when you need to go beyond adding a data source to your application. If you use Tomcat in production, chances are you need to go further than that, for example to manage sessions in a cluster. In this case, Tomcat 6 developer’s guide will be a real asset.

From http://blog.frankel.ch/tomcat-6-developers-guide