Review by Patrick Butler Monterde
This book combines the best current software practices. Through Java it provides the reader with knowledge in programming principles, good practices, object oriented programming and modeling, software patterns and structures and good code examples.
The book begins with the basics of Internet, computer story and java inner workings. It introduces the reader to programming principles using java graphical applications and applets. I think the authors made a good choice of using the swing library from the first chapter. By using swing on the simple examples and gradually introducing the readers to more advanced swing functionality the authors familiarize them to the swing library from the beginning, demystifying the use of graphical user interfaces in Java.
Object Oriented concepts are introduced along with UML diagrams. I really liked the use of UML on the explanations and examples. I would like to have seen a more extensive introduction to UML, maybe a quick tutorial in the appendix, since the book is mainly directed toward beginner programmers. I believe that learning modeling and programming of software applications at the same time is one of the keys of good programming.
I also like the fact that the code examples in the book come in color, like all the screenshots and graphics. Syntax coloring is quite useful when dealing with the code examples in the more advanced chapters.
The book comes in a box with the usual CD containing the books code, IDE and other miscellaneous software applications. It also contains a two CDs multimedia course.
The multimedia course contains all the chapters and code in the book plus Java Media Framework software. I found quite useful to have the chapters available on the web browser while you are testing the code and doing the exercises.
The authors included a very nice feature in the multimedia course that I had never seen before. The code is commented with audio and it gives you the opportunity to run it directly and to download and save it if you want. Those features worked nicely in IE, but not in Netscape 4.77.
To summarize this book is great for beginner programmers, two hundred level programming classes and for experienced programmers interested in Java. It has good Java code examples that can be applied in real world applications, introduction to new Java frameworks (Java Media and Sound), great programming principles and the use of UML make the book very complete and a good buy.
Topics covered by the book:
- Java Applets and applications.
- Control structures, arrays and strings.
- Object-oriented programming using UML.
- GUIs, Swing user interfaces, Java graphics and Java2D.
- Exception handling, multithreading, file I/O, JDBC and database connectivity.
- Networking, sockets, data structures and collections.
- Java Servlets and JavaBeans.
About the book:
Title: Java: How to program
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