Acknowledgments

After writing six Java books over the past five years , I've learned that it's crucial to have a good set of reviewers. For this book, I was fortunate enough to have the best set of reviewers an author could possibly have.

First, I'd like to thank Marty Hall, the author of Core Servlets and JSP and More Servlets and JSP for his thorough and insightful review of this book. Marty's review comments added considerably to the quality of this book.

Second, I'd like to thank Jan Luehe for providing excellent review comments that went way above and beyond the call of duty. Jan was one of the handful of developers that implemented the JSTL Reference Implementation, and he pointed out many inconsistencies and misunderstandings that I originally had about JSTL, especially the internationalization and database actions, which can be rather complicated to initialize and use. Like Marty, Jan considerably increased the quality of this book by his sage observations.

Many other people also provided excellent review comments that I relentlessly incorporated into the book. I was fortunate to have Pierre Delisle, who is the lead engineer for JSTL, agree to review this book. Pierre provided many review comments that only someone in his position could make. Norbert Lindenberg, who is an internationalization specialist at Sun provided numerous comments on the internationalization and formatting chapters. Ryan Lubke, who implemented the test kit for the JSTL also provided numerous pithy comments, along with Lance Anderson and Carole Mah, whom I recruited from the Jakarta Taglibs mailing list to review the database chapter. Scott Ferguson, the developer of the excellent Resin app server,was also gracious enough to review another of my books. Lars Garshol, who has worked on the Goldfarb XML series from Prentice Hall helped me out considerably with the XML chapter. Finally, my good friend and resident Java expert, Rob Gordon, also provided me with excellent review comments.