Browse Books

Reviewer: George Hacken

Today, the term "tutorial" connotes a relatively brief or superficial treatment of a given subject. This connotation can cause an association with online slide presentations, or with titles that contain the word "dummies." Readers who are looking for something more should let denotation, at least of the book's main title, be their guide; this book truly teaches Java, and does so quite thoroughly and at a very professional level. Having read through the book, I judge the word "short" in the subtitle to be descriptive of the authors' pedagogical efficiency, and not of the attention given its various topics. "Basics" in the subtitle is also accurate: what is taught is fundamental. Java is presented comprehensively (platform, environment, object orientation (OO), use of regular expressions, concurrency, and graphical user interface), and the programming language itself is presented in considerable detail. Java's very nature strongly couples the two views, that is, the general platform with the specific procedural and object-oriented programming language. The book comes with a CD, refers to Web pages for online material, and comes with a 45-day online e-book license coupon. I had no trouble downloading the NetBeans 5.5.1 environment, both to Windows XP and to GNU/Linux. Furthermore, I had no problems using it in Windows XP. (I have no reason to doubt its working under Linux.) There are 18 chapters, each ending with well-designed questions and exercises, and with the Web addresses of online answers. The one-page Appendix A is devoted to a table of Java's keywords. Appendix B's self-explanatory title is "Preparation for Java Programming Language Certification." This appendix is a summary of seven main topics, useful irrespective of one's certification ambitions: declarations, initialization, and scoping; flow control; application programming interface (API) contents; concurrency; OO concepts; collections (containers) and generics; and sundry fundamentals. The chapters are well paced. One pleasant difficulty of this book is resisting the strong temptation to dive into and linger in one of the many substantive and clearly written sections, for instance the chapter that addresses concurrency. Versions 5.0 and up have high-level concurrency APIs. The class SimpleThreads is a good starter example of this ultra-tricky concurrency business. It is not a criticism of the book to note that some residue of a "real" machine (computer) still inheres in the Java Virtual Machine: Read and write operations are atomic, but not for long and double data types. As the book's excellent warning example shows, " x++; " cannot be presumed atomic since it is made up of several lower-level machine instructions. Java, of course, addresses these issues by providing synchronization and monitor-lock facilities. Chapters 4 through 7, which cover classes through packages, offer a progressive and cohesive means of mastering object-oriented principles. Page 99 has an excellent intuition-enhancing description of the "life cycle of an object within a program." The Planet class shows usage of the Java-latecomer "enum." I have a minor quibble about an analogy regarding OO concepts, on page 33: I don't think that breed is a state of a dog. It is hard to ignore any one chapter, but chapter 13, on regular expressions, helped rebuild my confidence in constructing and using regular expressions (regexes). The Java infrastructure for their use is very powerful, and is clearly explained and demonstrated. The final chapter on applets will launch one into that popular technology. This excellent book should be read before one decides, for any reason (including job prerequisites), to master Java and object-oriented programming in all its considerable glory. Online Computing Reviews Service

Reviewer: Karthikeya M. GajjalaPurna

The Java series of books from Sun has always lived up to reader expectations, delivering Java from the source. This book is no exception; it provides all the need-to-know information about the basics of the Java programming language, including some of the latest features in Java 5 and 6 like concurrency improvements, generics, and collections. This book starts with basic object-oriented programming concepts. Anyone who has already been programming in C++ or Java can skip this chapter. The next two chapters describe the basics of the Java language data types, control flows, the semantics of objects, and access control of member variables. For any serious Java programmer, this chapter can be skipped, except for the discussion of new additions to recent versions of Java. The next chapter covers, in detail, the interfaces and inheritance. The explanations are very clear, and anyone embarking on the Java journey will come out of this chapter with a solid understanding. The chapter on generics is my favorite, with nice and succinct information on the new features in the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) Development Kit (JDK) 5.0. The chapter on exception handling is another one of my favorites. It clearly outlines the best ways one should use exceptions. The collections chapter is very good and detailed, however I did notice some missing details on WeakHashMaps. The authors explain in detail the functional aspects of the collections. I would have loved to see some performance details as well, and some use cases for picking the right collection. Java performance tuning [1] contains some good information on the performance aspects. The concurrency chapter is also one of my favorites, as it details the new additions to this package. Java concurrency in practice [2] is a more detailed reference on concurrency. The chapters on regular expressions and Swing are adequate. I also liked the section on certification preparation. Overall, I like the tone of this book. It delivers the most important information about the programming language in a concise fashion. This is an excellent book for someone who is just starting out with Java. For more advanced programmers, this is a good book for learning the new concepts introduced in recent versions.