Stripes: ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again [Paperback]

That's pretty strong praise, I know, but well deserved. For the last 10 years I have attempted to keep my skill set sharp by reading and playing with new languages, frameworks, and concepts. Everyone knows the most frustrating part of most technical books is that the code samples never work. Or the author makes assumptions about your level of knowledge on something peripheral yet essential to getting the code to run.
Not so with this book.
This book will take you through all the basics to get this framework up and running in less than 10 minutes. I was amazed the first time a colleague showed me Stripes. I had never heard of it. With Stripes we were able to get a full blown web application up running using EJB 3.0 for persistence, Guice for injecting beans, and Stripes tags for the view in minutes. Naturally, I chalked this up to my colleague's expertise - the guy is scary smart. So when I changed jobs and was asked about frameworks I liked, I said Stripes.
Although the documentation on the Stripes site may be OK for gurus like my former colleague, I found myself struggling to repeat our success with Stripes by myself until I bought this book. The examples are clear, the writing enjoyable to read, and the code just flat out works.
There were some minor things that did not work as I expected them to, when I expected them to, but usually this was due to my own error. Sometimes I found I had missed something in the reading or simply gotten ahead of the author.
When I did have questions about why things weren't working quite right or why something was done a certain way, I simply posted a note on the Stripes mailing list and I was answered directly by the author himself. As I am writing this, Mr. Daoud is actually going over my configuration to see what I messed up when trying to get the Stripes MockServletContext to run properly.
In fact, I have had Tim Fennell and Frederic Daoud respond directly to questions via email in less than 2 hours the few times I have had questions on anything Stripes related. It was also nice to see that one of the questions I posted on the mailing list regarding client side validation and passing the event name via JavaScript was actually addressed in the book on page 345.
If I sound excited about the book, it's because I am. The Stripes framework, the Stripes community, Tim Fennell, and Frederic Daoud are all fantastic. But now that I have this book, I have a Stripes expert with me all the time.

I received this book few days before Christmas, and I'm now really impressed: in few weeks, following this beautiful manual, I got all the necessary information and skills I need to start using the Stripes Framework for my own projects!
I successfully implemented also the Stripersist library and Hibernate, and everything is working fine from the beginning.
Stripes is a recent tool, but we are lucky because the official website is rich of useful information and the documentation is very accurate; we are lucky because Stripes is very powerful but also extremely simple, and Frederic Daoud did a fantastic work writing this book!
It's very well organized, introducing components and arguments of the framework in a logic and developer-friendly way.
Chapters on Layout Reuse, Custom Messages and Persistance are absolutely stunning, definitively one of the best tecnical book I have read in the last year!
On the Pragmatic Programmer's web site you can find the zipped source code with all the book's examples: it's useful to keep everything under control, looking at the entire class code, following the changes introduced in the book.

I just finished this book and I have to say that it is one of the best written programming books I've ever read. The thing that wasn't so clear to me before I bought the book was how comprehensive it was--after having read it, it is by far, one of the most comprehensive, end-to-end books I've ever read.

I've been involved w/ web application development for over a decade, and no other framework has piqued my interest like Stripes. In addition to being "new" and not carrying over the baggage other frameworks have from prior versions, Stripes is a refreshing change.

In addition, the Stripes user community is just absolutely fantastic! Post a question to the mail list, and you'll have an answer back quicker than you'd expect--and the depth of knowledge of those on the list is both wonderful and amazing.

This wonderful framework combined with a great user community and now this excellent book makes Stripes worth learning, and Daoud's book is a bible to learning everything from the fundamentals and basics to advanced topics. I can't praise it enough! VERY well written!

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