Many new editions of technical books I have purchased have not entirely been worth the purchase price. Usually the updated material is limited in scope or fairly light. The new edition of this book is definitely worth it.[…]

Overall, I consider this book, especially this edition, an absolute must have in my professional bookshelf.

And here’s an excerpt from the Preface that describes the differences compared to the first edition:

Readers of the First EditionIf you’ve read JavaServer Pages, 1st Edition, you will first of all notice that in this edition, most of the custom components have been replaced in favor of the equivalent standard components from JSTL; a specification I’ve been lucky enough to contribute to and help shape the standard based on many of the ideas explored in the first edition. Secondly, you’ll notice that all chapters have been substantially improved and extended, and that new chapters have been added to highlight important features such as custom actions and JavaBeans, explain how to process XML data, and how to integrate your custom components with the standard JSTL components.

All chapters have also been updated to cover the features and clarifications added in the JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.3 (which JSP 1.2 is based on) specifications, primarily:

• New XML syntax for JSP pages.
• New listener and filter component types.
• New tag library validator.
• New options for tag library deployment and distribution.
• New tag handler interfaces and return values.
• New tag library descriptor elements to minimize the need for TagExtraInfo classes
• Improved support for pages stored in other encodings than ISO-8859-1.
• Improved rules and a new mechanism for attribute value conversion.
• Improvements to the include action.
• Clarifications of the reuse of tag handler instances and their lifecycle.
• Alignment of the tag library descriptor elements with the elements in other J2EE descriptors.