My copy of Pro JSF and Ajax showed up on Friday, and I sat down to read it this weekend. I had put it on preorder, based only on the credibility built up by reading the author's posts on JSF.
Below is the review I posted on Amazon. I believe that this book will be on the bookshelf of anyone writing JSF components. Congrats to Jonas and John on a job well done. Steve -- The first round of books on JSF were survey books that attempt to cover all of this complex, sophisticated framework. Pro JSF and Ajax focuses on one important facet of JSF -- component development -- and does it well. It starts with a quick overview of the major architectural elements of JSF, and then quickly moves to building custom components in Chapter 2. The first component built is a simple date entry component; a second, more sophisticated example is a 'deck' implementation (a deck is a collapsing navigational/browsing UI element). The authors then provide a succinct overview of client side rich internet technologies -- Ajax, XUL (supported by Firefox) and HTC (the DHTML behavior language that is supported by Internet Explorer). They then deploy these technologies to build rich client versions of the date and deck components. The book does a good job of bridging the gap between JSF 1.1 and 1.2 implementations; the code in the book targets 1.1, but discusses how implementation would differ in 1.2. For someone starting out developing in JSF, I'd recommend this book in combination with the strong survey of JSF in JavaServer Faces by Hans Bergsten.
