This week, we're delighted to have Donald Brown & Chad Michael Davis helping to answer questions about their new book Struts 2 in Action. They will hang out in the Struts forum.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 29th 2008 and will end on Friday, May 2nd 2008.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Manning.

Please see the book promotions page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Ernest reviewed jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and gave it a whopping 10 out of 10 horseshoes.

Every technical book should be like this one; ... "jQuery in Action" is concise but clear, humorous but not silly, and answers all the questions it raises, quickly. ... Perhaps the most commendable feature of "jQuery in Action" is its unflinching honesty. ... [The authors] present their topic as it is, describe its merits, and let the reader decide.

You can read the full review and discuss it here.

This week, we're delighted to have Binildas A. Christudas helping to answer questions about their new book Service Oriented Java Business Integration. They will hang out in the Web Services forum.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 15th 2008 and will end on Friday, April 18th 2008.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Packt Publishing.

Please see the book promotions page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Jeanne reviewed Pro JavaScript Design Patterns by Ross Harmes and Dustin Diaz and gave it 9 out of 10 horseshoes.

All patterns were described clearly and succinctly. There were some real examples as well. At times, it is a bit code heavy -- one example had 1.5 pages of implementation details that had nothing to do with the topic at end. Overall, I think the book was great. If you have a significant amount of JavaScript code, the concepts in this book are critical.

You can read the full review and discuss it here.

Jeanne reviewed Ant in Action by Steve Loughran and Erik Hatcher and gave it 8 out of 10 horseshoes.

For those new to Ant, features are clearly described with good examples and good descriptions of "what happens if _____." The flow diagrams helped visualize concepts nicely. ... For those who have been using Ant, there are margin notes about what was added in 1.6/1.7 along with coverage of Ivy. ... I've been using Ant for complex builds for three years and still had a page of take away points from this book. I recommend it for the valuable information and techniques.

You can read the full review and discuss it here.

The next issue of the JavaRanch Journal is out. It contains articles about:

• What It Means to Mock: Isolating Units for Testing
• Aspect Oriented Programming in Spring 2.5
• Open Source and the SaaS Development Connection
• Handling Uncommon File Formats - Introducing Lexers
• Interview with Bear Bibeault, author and JavaRanch sheriff
• Authentication using JAAS
• Interesting stuff elsewhere on the Ranch

This week, we're delighted to have Venkat Subramaniam helping to answer questions about their new book Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer. They will hang out in the Object Oriented Scripting forum.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 8th 2008 and will end on Friday, April 11th 2008.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Please see the book promotions page to ensure your best chances at winning!

This week, we're delighted to have James L. Weaver helping to answer questions about their new book JavaFX Script: Dynamic Java Scripting for Rich Internet/Client-side Applications. They will hang out in the HTML and Javascript forum.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 1st 2008 and will end on Friday, April 4th 2008.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, APress.

Please see the book promotions page to ensure your best chances at winning!