A bold look at a difficult man. Tchaikovsky, terrified that his sexuality would become a topic of scandal, split his powerful sexual response between (a) male members of his family on whom he showered very intense affection and (b) young men, sometimes young boys, who were often rough-trade prostitutes. Anthony Holden offers a succinct, persuasive, well-written portrait. Although short on analysis of Tchaikovsky's music (the man was a genius at representing emotion), Holden is especially good at examining the composer's emotional relationships and the causes of his death: did he die of cholera or arsenic? by infection or suicide? If you like biographies of musicians, you'll love this one.

Many kudos to Mr. Holden for this spectacular effort! This is what biography is to be! A careful reconstruction of a life, with logical extrapolation of missing points and a compelling analysis of historical inconsistencies in this unique figure. I especially appreciated the author's relative absence from the narrative (i.e., he was not telling us constantly how he felt about the facts of the biography). Gratefully, he did not editorialize about the biographies central issue: Tchaikovsky's homosexuality. The issue too often derails serious historical research, either to condemn or to convert to the cause. A sheer delight of a read.

Select virtually any adjective that comes to mind and it most likely will be applicable to this "too bizarre to be true" picture of a male homosexual nymphomaniac (my term). One of the supreme musical geniuses of Western music tormented by "irresistible" urges to copulate with 14-year old boys taken off the streets of Florence, Rome, etc., etc. His highly emotional music surely mirrors his inner torment.

For developers involved with web-based projects, whether it be an online store for electronic commerce or an Intranet site for accessing and modifying company data, the powerful blend of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technologies can really make life simple. Once you've mastered them, creating new components that encapsulate business logic, or new web interfaces to existing systems, is easy. The trick, for developers, is mastering the technologies.

Professional JSP is one way to get up to speed. Like many of the books published by Wrox Press, Professional JSP covers a specific technology in-depth, as well as the various ancillary topics relating to it such as databases, servlets, and XML. While not every developer will need every web technology covered by the book (and there are many), the book works both as a tutorial to cover the basics and a reference for technologies that you may encounter later.

Professional JSP starts by covering the basics of Java Server Pages, and how they relate to other web technologies. Embedded in HTML pages, JSP provides an easy mechanism for creating interactive web interfaces that draws on server-side components, known as Enterprise JavaBeans. While the presentation logic is written in JSP, the processing occurs within these JavaBean components. The book takes a balanced approach, covering both JSP and its syntax, as well as how to write and interact with JavaBeans to perform useful tasks, like accessing databases through JDBC and using other Java technologies. However, if you've read other Wrox titles, you may find there is some overlap in the topics covered.

One of the nice things about Professional JSP is that, in addition to covering theory, it goes further and examines practical applications of JSP, and issues for programmers like security and debugging. Like other titles in the Professional series, there are case studies of real projects using JSP and related technologies. My favorite would have to be the case study on porting Active Server Pages to JSP -- something that is extremely important for developers with "legacy" web systems. On the whole, Professional JSP is an excellent book for web developers wanting to get up to speed with Java Server Pages, web development, and Enterprise JavaBeans. However, developers with less of a web presentation focus and more of back-end server view may also want to consider the excellent Professional Java Server Programming title, which also covers JSP. -- David Reilly, reviewed for the Java Coffee Break

This book covers the chapters in a very structured way. It starts with a concise description of the JSP Basics with a detailed explanation of the concepts. It explains all the concepts in a very clear and simple words supported by an equally clear Comments and examples. Any body with a little of Java experience can become very familiar with the JSP syntax and concepts by reading first few chapters. It covers all the necessary JSP syntax for building a small web application to a very large distributed Application. It also explains about the way the JSP pages are processed by different web servers. For example it explains about the various methods available to maintain a persistence session and their merits and demerits. This is the first book in JSP series that explains not only the concepts of JSP and how effectively one can use them with the help of this book. It also covers various other topics like EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT and WML in very detailed way. Overall I feel this is the greatest JSP book ever published so far. I could build a simple and robust JSP Web application by reading the first few chapters in a short period of time.

This books lives up to its title in that it provides both real-world JSP techniques (through 7 very informative case studies chapters), as well as JSP background information that serves as a quick start guide. I rank it as one of the top 2 JSP books currently available (the other one is Web Development With JavaServer Pages by Messrs. Fields and Kolb).

After the JSP fundamentals are out of the way (which I am sure any JSP newcomer will appreciate and can benefit from), the book picks up pace with discussion on JDBC connection pooling, and the best practice for data access from JSP. Then comes the chapter on custom tags. My favorite chapters are the ones on debugging JSP's and implementing the MVC design pattern in JSP/servlets.

The case studies are very comprehensive and closely correlated to the earlier chapters. In one case study the design methodology is clearly explained with UML diagrams, which are very helpful to someone who is currently architecting an enterprise Java Web application. Other case studies cover such a wide area of topics such as JSP in combination with LDAP, EJB, XSL, and WAP.

For ASP developers, this books has two enormously useful chapters to get them started on JSP right away. One is a case study showing how to port an ASP app to JSP, and the other compares and contrasts the object model and syntax between ASP and JSP.

Having said all the above, this book does suffer from certain weaknesses. One is typical of any multi-author book, i.e., repeat of the same topic in different chapters. This is the case with JDBC, which shows up in both chapters 4 and 7. Another problem is the lack of the use of a standard servlet/JSP container, which will help new users to run all samples under the same software setting (although there is an appendix on setting up Tomcat server). Finally, a few chapters seem to be out of place in term of the logic flow of concept, such as the ones on dynamic GUI's and JNDI.

Finally, this book is still thin on heavy-duty J2EE topics, such as EJB, distributed transactions, message service, and interoperability with CORBA. This is why I consider it as an intermediate level book, not an advanced one. Hopefully we will see another Wrox book in the near future that addresses some of these issues.