Book Review: How Tomcat Works
September 2, 2004 – 5:33 pmBudi Kurniawan and Paul Deck: How Tomcat Works. BrainySoftware.com, 2004, 097521280X, 450 pages.
Kurniawan and Deck’s How Tomcat Works is a narrower
book than some, but
seems to be driven by the universal need to make sense of things. The book
delivers exactly what its title promises: a detailed, step-by-step
explanatio of how the world’s most popular Java servlet container
works. The authors start with a naive web server that does nothing
except serve static HTML pages until it’s told to stop. From that
humble beginning, they build up to a full-blown servlet container one
feature at a time. Each time they add code, they explain what it’s
doing, and (more importantly) _why_ it’s needed. Their English is
occasionally strained, and there were paragraphs I had to read several
times to understand, but this book is nevertheless an invaluable
resource for every servlet programmer who wants to know more about her
world.