Core JavaServer™ Faces, by David Geary and Cay Horstmann

I found this to be a concise and informative volume discussing JavaServer Faces. It did a good job of showing both how the technology works and why it can save a developer time and effort. After reading it, I was able to look at a fairly complicated source tree using JSF and quickly make sense of it. As is the case with most technical texts these days it is laden with examples; this is both a blessing and a curse. Because Faces is a web solution, it needs a beefy technology stack to be useful; I thought the stack that the authors chose was discussed in much more detail than was needed. Towards the end of the book, there were a lot of orthogonal tools mentioned as well that seemed very out of place. While interesting, LDAP and Seam don’t have much to do with web front ends. All in all, a solid introduction to JSF.

First Sentence:

Judging from the job advertisements at employment web sites, there are two popular techniques for developing web applications:

• The “rapid development” style, in which you use a visual development environment, such as Microsoft APS.NET
• The “hard-core coding” style, in which you write lots of code to support a high-performance backend, such as Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition)