lostinnewark said
I like this book because it brings together in one place a lot of information that is helpful in real-world development tasks. My complaint is that it seems carelessly edited, leaving you with a collection of chapters obviously written by different authors who didn't communicate much with each other in the formation of the book.

It's nice to be able to get the new Java 5 features under your belt in just a couple of hours of reading and playing around. In fact, the first chapter is excellent, code samples and all. The next chapter is nice for a quick review of methodologies, or if you are completely new to the frameworks that are often used in conjunction with Agile Programming in Java, such as JUnit and Hibernate and so on. Chapter 3 is a capable introduction to some of the more popular Design Patterns, but it is here that you first notice that the author ignores all the advice in Chapters 1 and 2 about how much easier your development will be if you use the new language features of Java 5 and the tools and methodologies of Agile development.

Things go downhill by Chapter 4, which covers Swing desktop GUI design and coding. The sample apps aren't all that well designed and don't don't demonstrate everything presented in Chapter 3 (such as the MVC application architecture) in a clear, convincing way. And it is here that you encounter the most shocking deficiencies of this book: sloppy, difficult-to-read sample code that compiles and runs--more or less--but which contains numerous lines (and even entire blocks) of extraneous code, poorly-chosen and sometimes even capitalized local and member variable names, and code stucture that defies best coding practices in many places. It is the type of code that you get when you hurry to meet a deadline for a prototype, and which you have not yet gotten around to going back and cleaning up.

Things pick back up a bit in subsequent chapters, with a nice intro to J2EE and J2EE-oriented API's, messaging, security, and a fine chapter on the much-neglected subject of application deployment.

Overall, I'm glad I bought this book. I've learned a lot from it, despite it's few annoyances. In fact, I made an exercise out of cleaning up the kludgy code samples in chapter 4. No, I'm not being sarcastic--I really did find it far more helpful and educational to patch that code up than to just read it through and then kid myself that I had internalized it. Who knows--maybe all sample code should be written with some defects.

jayaratchagan said
Chpater 1: Key Java Language Features and Libraries - the only chapter that talks about JDK 5.

Waste of time to proceed further.

Anonymous said
This book is great reference to user who find issues about patterns, JFC, and a review of Java 5.

joshua_pan said
We all have heard the saying that nothing is perfect. Well, it certainly is the case with this book. This book will not make you an expert in every single J2EE technology. Will give you a good introduction though! I thought the first couple of chapters on the new additions to Java Tiger were pretty solid. However, the chapters on Networking and Security were too shallow. No big deal though. Just buy Java Network Programming from Oreilly. Murach's Just Java 6th edition is a nice book to have in addition to this book. It touches the stuff that this one doesn't, and it misses the stuff that this book presents solidly. So, there you have it. Buy both, and you will get the best of both worlds. But whatever you do, do not even consider Herbert Schildt's 1.5 if you are a beginner.

Anonymous said
As a long time C++ database application developer, I quickly picked up the concepts and ideas presented in the text. Excellent programming guide... particularly in chapter 11.