No comments about Aprenda Java - YA.

2 comments about Java Application Strategies for the AS/400.

1. It's excellent book for RPG programmers looking for introduction to Java. This book gives solid base in Java with explanations on OO concepts and working practical examples. The only weakness of this book is poor information about how Java works/runs in the AS/400 environment.



2. As in his seminars, Don Denoncourt attempts to reach two objectives in a very limited time. The first is to teach object-oriented concepts to RPG programmers. He does a pretty good job of this. The second objective, not covered by any other book I am aware of, is to introduce us to the invaluable tools of record-level access and JDBC, as well as PCML and a few other means of interacting with the 400. These sections of the book make it an essential tool for any programmer transitioning AS/400 databases to Java access. I only wish he had included more information on connection strategies such as applets and EJB.

No comments about Special Edition Using Java Development Tools: The Most Complete Reference (Special Edition Using).

No comments about Java 2 - Version 5.

5 comments about Using Java 2 Platform: Special Edition (Special Edition Using...).

1. The good part is that the book covers a broad range of Java-related stuff. However, the writing style is annoying at times, and is almost impossible to understand at some points. Worst of all though, are all the errors. The book can't have been proof-read, the samples contain errors (even on the CD) and have obviously not been tested. A typical example is the JDBC chapters, which explain the underlying mechanisms in detail, but every single example contains syntactical and other errors. When reading this book, I found myself getting so annoyed that my wife forced me to throw it out. There must be better books that cover the same topics. Please look for them.



2. This book had me initially very excited. Although a bit confusing in overall structure and flow, it had its moments. The first sign of trouble was when I installed the JDK which I downloaded. The book's instructions on how to name the directories had conflicting examples, happily I worked through that one on intuition. It starts to get unbearable when the examples in the book AND cd have syntax and logical errors. Not being one to waste my money completely, I will continue reading the book (albeit with a critical eye) to grasp some, hopefully not entirely incorrect, concepts. Sorry to say, I am very disappointed.



3. Way too many Errors ! Cannot learn from this book. Samples from the CD won't compile either.



4. First, to echo what has been stated repeatedly in other reviews: there are WAY TOO MANY TYPOS in this book! This book was required for my Java class (who made that choice?), but I wish I could've picked another one. The typos crop up at a rate of about one in every two pages. If you're a relatively experienced programmer, it's not too hard to spot them and decifer the meaning (that is what an editor is supposed to do though, right?), but for a beginner they could prove to be a real problem. Even being able to spot and correct them for yourself, it tends to bring the pace of the book to a grinding halt causing one to have to re-read passages with the corrections in mind.

   Secondly, the examples the author uses are horrible. While they might reflect the topic at hand, they are overly complicated most of the time and lack focus. Other times the author tries to amuse us with his examples (there's a Casey Jones theme that runs through the earlier chapters), but they tend to distract rather than educate. Even simple examples are often handled poorly. For example, almost every other programming text, when illustrating booleans, tend to liken them to a switch being on or off, or a simple conditional situation as being true or false, etc. In this book we are given the example of a piece of paper being on or off of a table. Granted, there is nothing technically wrong with this, but it just seems like the author is trying to hard to be different.

   Lastly, I don't like the author's technique of showing poor programming style and then later on showing how it can be improved. This is mainly because he often doesn't point out that the poor example is illustrating this fact. For example, early in the discussion of classes we are shown many examples that have public data members. It isn't till somewhat later that we are told, no, these should actually be declared private with public access methods. Once again, to a novice programmer, I think this tends to muddy the point, causing one to have to go back and look at prior examples a second time in order to realize that they were illustrating poor programming style.

   Overall I feel that Weber is a competent and knowledgeable Java programmer, but he's not an effective educator. I would heartily recommend "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel over this book. I give this book two stars mainly because the info is in there, but is just too much of a pain to extract it. I'd probably rate it higher if they'd re-edit the book and make it freely available to those who already bought this edition.




5. I bought this book thinking that it covers most of the topics in JAVA but I was wrong. It does cover all the topics but not a single topic is covered well.... there are "tons" of errors in this book. Most of the time the book contradicts itself. I would recommend " Java2: A Completee Reference" by Patrik Noughton for the beginers and the advanced Java Programmers.

No comments about How to Program Bongo.

5 comments about Java 2 Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, 3rd Edition.

1. I was disappointed in this book. It contained many errors and typos. This is not recommended for anyone who want to prepare thoroughly for the exam. I'm on my second study guide to prepare for the exam. One of the earlier reviewer was on the money about his review. I should have listened.



2. I'm going to make short here. The topic covered in this book is not detail enough. A lot of important detail in inner class, AWT, Layout manager, Thread, contructor override and overload is not cover in depth detail. The concept in the book is straight and simple. It may be good to understand. However to pass your examination, you need more than what is covered in the topic of this book. My suggestion is why spend so much money buying a book that doesn't give whatu need to pass your examination.
   I would suggest you go for "The Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide: Programmer's and Developers Exams (With CD-ROM) -- by Simon Roberts".



3. This book only covers what a novice programmer already know. It doesn't really cover the more difficult topics tested in the exam. I'd highly recommend that you consider the "Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide" which explains the difficult topics in a clear, concise and detailed manner.



4. I got this from a friend who had just used it to pass the Programmer Exam. He recommended it highly and I do too. Java 2 All-in-One covers both the programmer and the developer exams. It provides an excellent chapter by chapter breakdown of what you need to know to pass the exams, providing a solid mix of detail, examples and review.



5. The Java 1.4 Exam 310-035 is the actual one I used this book to study for. One thing I didn't mention is that the version of this book I had only covered the 1.2 exam. Thanks for my friend's recommendation I skipped the java.io and java.awt discussions when studying for the Java 1.4 exam. The Java 1.4 exam also covers wrappers, collections and assertions. Wrapper classes are covered in this book on pages 301 to 305 so this gave me what I needed to know based on the 310-035 exam objectives. In this book pages 314 to 318 cover collections and gave me a good start on what I needed to know for the exam. I also used a few java web sites to help me study collections, wrappers and assertions just to be safe, so this book with the additional help from one of these sites should get you a good score. I'm waiting for mine now but had no trouble on the exam whatsoever.

4 comments about WebSphere V3.5 Handbook.

1. I found this book very handy and useful when working with Websphere Application server. Mostly used feature are documented but rarely used features are not documented at all.



2. I found this book unwieldy in it's size (1154 pages including the index and appendices) and not very helpful for the beginning admin, which is all of us, including IBM!! There are hundreds, if not thousands, of screenshots, but very little in the way of explanation. I need a book that addesses the tasks I most need to do as a WebSphere Admin, with explanations as to why and how to do them. I have found that IBM's online Infocenter for WebSphere is the best resource for this. Bottom line: As a WAS admin you should have this book, but Infocenter may be more helpful.



3. Becoming a WebSphere Administrator is a daunting task. The product is complex and IBM documentation is often abstract, theoretical, and incomplete. I struggled for a couple of months until I got this book. I found this book to be full of accessible information related to WebSphere configuration and maintenance. This book was exactly what I needed to become effective as a WebSphere Admin.



4. I bought this hoping for an introduction to WAS. Instead, I found this full of typos and a badly made CD.

5 comments about Enterprise JavaBeans(TM): Developing Component-Based Distributed Applications.

1. I bought this book bcos it was the official text for a course i was supposed to attend. But i am a bit dissapointed. Lack details when compared to O'Reilly's book. Its expensive than O'Reilly's but contains very less content . Doesnt talk about the new DD's ( XML based ) and the samples are trivial . If you are a seroius EJB developer look for O'Reilly's book or even Ed Romans Mastering EJB will be a good bet.



2. Valesky's book tries to cover the subject of Enterprise Javabeans in 323 pages. He starts with an excellent description and overview of the technologies available to the programmer and compares and contrasts them with EJB. The book's worthiness tends to drop at that point. Chapter 2 is an exhaustive and brain numbing chapter covering all the classes, methods and properties of EJB. By the end of this chapter my brain was reeling with information overload.

   Chapter 3, actually was an excellent chapter, giving a short and sweet example of EJB. I felt like what I actually read in Chapter 2 made sense despite the overload. However, the book goes permanently downhill afterwards. A supposed "simple example" in the following chapters cover an e-commerce system which is so big that the code was listed entirely in an appendix. I certainly couldn't qualify that as "simple" and made it extremely difficult to learn the basic concepts. Worse, he provides little explanation for his code examples. More or less it was presented, "Here's a code snippet that does X -- check it out".

   I think I could get much more out of the Sun doc pages. I was extremely frustrated with the book and its treatment of EJB. Ed Roman's book was so much better.




3. With no WebLogic background I was able to get Tom's examples working and get a great understanding of how EJB actually works in practice.

   It's nice to work with a book in which the examples actually compile and run without errors! While others are critical of the details of chapter two, I say bravo! Tom explains exactly what is happening under the covers which is most helpful to real programmers.

   I love this book. It is an authoritative book on EJB. A great way to get hands on experience. Keep up the good work Tom. We appreciate it!




4. With little experience on EJB prior to accessing this book, I found the chapter 3 is an excellent one. I spend 2 hours reading through chapter 3 and I feel I understand EJB a lot better than I used to. I definitely recommend this book to EJB beginners.



5. This is a delightfully lucid introduction to Enterprise Java Beans. Unfortunately, it was published in 1999 and is a lucid introduction to EJB version 1.1, not the more current 2.0. Let's hope Mr. Valesky has a new edition in the works! Also, it is a relatively brief introduction, not a comprehensive how-to manual, so many of the necessary but mind-numbing details are left out. Nevertheless, the book would be useful as a conceptual introduction, perhaps to be followed by something meatier.

5 comments about Graphic Java 1.1: Mastering the AWT.

1. There are very many sorry Java books on the market these days. Therefore, I was very glad to discover "Graphic Java", 2nd edition. I found it to be a thorough guide to the AWT. In addition, it is accurate throughout, whereas many books fail to properly explain and use the new event model or other features of JDK 1.1.

   The book covers every aspect of the AWT, including events, containers vs components, layout managers, lightweight components, etc. Each discussion is peppered with effective examples that clarify the topic at hand. And, along the way, the authors point out good coding tips, such as the effective use of inner classes for event handling, proper object-oriented design, etc.

   As if that all wasn't enough, the second half of the book presents a very useful library of custom components that extend the AWT. The source code for this library is on the CD, and the book explains much of the source in detail. This section is also very valuable in learning to understand the AWT.

   In a world full of mediocre, inaccurate Java books, this one is a JOY to read




2. I concur with the review listed above, but must add that anyone out there trying to use Layout managers must read the 100 pages dedicated to that topic in this book...absolutely the best coverage of GridBagLayout that I have ever seen, including a very demonstrative applet that goes a long way towards helping a person learn how to use this very complex layout manager. The only reason I couldn't rate this book a 10 is that I found several coding errors when examining and running the many, comprehensive examples contained on the CD that accompanies this book. Definitely a must read.



3. It helped quite a bit, but the book will get deep quick with not a lot of explanation of how it got there. Yes I have it, read it and like it.



4. Graphic Java 1.1: Mastering the AWT is the best book that I've come accross, so far, for AWT programming. The book is a little advanced, new Java programmers may find this to be a little difficult. However, at the same time, the book also clearly teaches the new 1.1 event handling model. This is an excellent book for anyone who needs to do Windows programming with Java.



5. Having read the reviews, I expected a lot of deep information. I was mistaken. It is not a bad book, but if it stands out, it is mostly because the majority of Java authors figure that publishing a poorly documented API is adequate. I'd call this an intermediate level book.

   It lacks a permuted index, which is a must for a book like this. A lot of the nitty-gritty information is presented as an aside to demonstrating the examples instead of a well thoughout discussion. Some of these are in the index and some are not.

   If you're looking for thorough discussions of the AWT architecture, keep looking. If you're looking for a good discussion of how to use layouts, this might be the book for you.