xxii

Introduction

technologies; they combine them both. Finally, as I discovered when I started

teaching servlet and JSP development to my students in the Johns Hopkins

part time graduate program (most of whom were professional software devel 

opers), few programmers were already comfortable with HTTP 1.1, HTML

forms, and JDBC, three critical supporting technologies. Telling them to get a

separate book for each of these areas was hardly reasonable: that brought to

five the number of books programmers needed if they were going to do serious

servlet/JSP development. 

So, in mid 1999, I put together a short servlet and JSP tutorial with a few

dozen examples, put it on the Web, and tried out the material in a couple of

my courses. The response was overwhelming. After only a few months, I

was getting several thousand visitors a day to the tutorial along with a myr 

iad of requests to expand the coverage of the material. I eventually bowed

to the inevitable and started writing. This book is the result. I hope you find

it useful.

Real Code for Real Programmers

This book is aimed at serious software developers. This is not a book that

touts the potential of e commerce or pontificates about how Web enabled

applications will revolutionize your business. Instead, it is a hands on book

aimed at helping programmers who are already convinced of the need for

dynamic Web sites get started building them right away. In showing how to

build these sites, I try to illustrate the most important approaches and warn

you of the most common pitfalls. Along the way, I include plenty of working

code: more than a hundred documented Java classes, for instance. I try to

give detailed examples of the most important and frequently used features,

summarize the lesser used ones, and refer you to the APIs (available

on line) for a few of the rarely used ones.

Nor is this a book that skims dozens of technologies at a high level.

Although I don't claim that this is a definitive reference on every technology

it touches on (e.g., there are a number of books this size just on JDBC), if the

book covers a topic, it does so in enough detail for you to sit down and start

writing real programs. The one exception to this rule is the Java programming

language itself. Although I don't assume any familiarity with server side pro 

gramming, I do expect you to be familiar with the basics of Java language

development. If you're not, you will need to pick up a good tutorial like Core

Java, Core Web Programming, or Thinking in Java.