I haven't read the specific book, but I generally have good experience with Manning books, so I would recommend Struts 2 in Action.
Also, I would generally recommend to start directly from Struts 2 as it has some adantages over the 1.x versions. However, if you are using Eclipse, I am not aware of any plug-ins for Struts 2. This could be a problem for a new user. For Netbeans there is this, but I haven't used it myself. For Struts 1.x there are mature plug-ins both for Eclipse and Netbeans.