Hi aby,
To be fair, struts is not for the beginner. There are, as siberian has mentioned, web sites that can give you a *jump start* to frameworks such as struts, but in my opinion, if you do not fully understand the basics of JSP and servlets, and particularly the pitfalls, then learning a framework without the knowledge of the technology that the framework is based on is disastrous.
Web services are the same. To write, say, SOAP webservices, you should have a sound knowledge of HTTP protocols and XML for a kick off.
I find that so many *frameworks* can be easily deployed to live servers without the developers really understanding how the underlying technolgies operate, and frankly, whilst most of the time this will be OK, when it comes to debugging an appilcation that is not running "how the book said it would", the devoloper will be lost.
My advice is, learn the basics, slowly. Once you know the base technologies you'll be in a far better postion to understand frameworks and other technolgies, and more importantly you'll know what they are doing, and be able to make a decision on whether a certain technology is for you.
And don't be impressed by the buzwords. A lot of the time, people think they should use struts or tapestry, or whatever framework, because they read that "so-and-so" was using it on slashdot.net. A lot of the time, these frameworks mean hassle, and unless you are in a developer environment where there is a clear distiniction between *web page*, *mid tier* and *backend* devel groups, frameworks mean that you spend a lot of time doing unecessary work, just because Joe Blogg's book said that MVC2 is *great*.
Don't believe the hype - learn the basics and decide on your own, for your own needs.
Take care.
