I’ve had this book for a couple of months now and I finally posted a review on Amazon. Here’s a copy of what I posted on Amazon.

Tomcat: The Definitive Guide is a great book about the most commonly used open-source servlet/JSP container. Tomcat is the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Tomcat is really powerful and flexible, but you really need a good book to figure out how to integrate Tomcat with Apache, how to set load-balancers, clustering, etc on all of the major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X.

This is where Tomcat: The Definitive Guide comes in. This really well written book makes it easy to follow for the developer as well as non-developer admin. The book starts with an introduction of Tomcat (v4.0) where you learn how to stop/start the server, learn about the directory structure, and learn to modify the start/stop scripts as well as the configuration settings. I really like the treatment given to security, realms and JAAS in the second chapter with more details in the sixth chapter. Most books of this type will leave out security and this book deals with it in the second chapter. Kudos to the authors for that.

I also really like the chapter on performance tuning that deals with real-world applications. The chapter on integration with the Apache webserver is really well written. Most people that deploy Tomcat in production will want to put Apache webserver in front of Tomcat to serve up static content like html and images while letting Tomcat handle servlets and JSPs. Most of the documentation about this Apache httpd ? Tomcat integration on the Internet deals with v1.3 of Apache httpd. However, the book deals with Apache 2.0, which is another plus for the book.

I can go on and on – If you are using Tomcat, planning on using Tomcat or just want to learn more about the server, this book will provide you with all of the information to help harness Tomcat’s power and wealth of features. I would highly recommend this book as a companion to any servlet/JSP programming book.