by George Reese

Published by O'Reilly

Review by Doug Harding

I have a project that I am working on to write a business application for some friends. I wanted to use JAVA because I figured that I would have an easier time finding others to work on the project in the future using it than I would if I did it using PowerBuilder. I have had JAVA training, but have not done much with it. I have been buying JAVA books for the last several months to help get myself ready for this project.

Last month I won a copy of this book in the drawing. I was pretty excited because I hadn't found a book on JDBC that I liked yet.

This book has been everything that I had hoped for. The writing is concise and easy to follow. The examples and diagrams are very clear.

George begins with a discussion of relational databases and SQL. He proceeds to a discussion of JDBC and how to implement a simple SQL Select statement using JDBC. There is a lengthy discussion on how to implement the connection to the database using JDBC drivers, with plenty of code samples. This is just what I needed to see.

For those who like to follow along with the examples, he even tells where you can find a simple relational database for free. The book carefully builds upon each concept with clear examples and excellent code samples.

The chapter on Distributed Application Architecture was of particular interest to me because that is going to play a big part in my project.

This is the kind of technical manual that programmers love to find.

This book will remain in my reference library for a long time.