by David Flanagan

Published by O'Reilly

Review by Albert Chang

A Book for Java Nuts

But wait a minute, just during the break of enjoying reading the book, I got an e-mail from Glen Lewis. It said: Are you willing to write a review of the book you got? Hmmm, I thought I really was a lucky guy, until receiving the email. The bottom line: is there any programming developer in the world who would like to write meaningless, time-consuming, dry, no-caffeine English sentences? No, not according to my years-experience of code writing.

However, this time I can not resist to writing something, simply because this is such a great book that I want to recommend it to every Java cracker so he or she can enjoy a cup of coffee too.

This book is caffeine. Once you have it, you cannot live without it. As its subtitle states "A desktop Quick Reference", it offers you a straightforward reference about class name, method, and syntax right at your fingertips. For example: Can a Runnable-type variable be the input parameter in Thread constructor? How about a String variable? etc. With the book, you will know these answers within seconds.

It is a thin book comparing to lot of other Java books available on bookstore shelves today. However, it covers most things in Java 1.1, including AWT, Java beans,Inner class, and so on. Some Java development tools such as Visual Cafe and JBuilder offer an online reference, but you may have to go through lines and lines to find what you want, even when you search by keyword.

Have you had the experience that after reading pages and pages in a book, you realized that the author actually could tell you in just one or two sentences. This book is nothing like that. The author shoots right at the targets.

For C & C++ programmers, this book also has excellent introduction. A "Hello World" example for both application and applet usage is included. Beside a well-edited index at the end of the book, it also provides an index of classes, methods and fields and a index tag on each page. Those indexes are very useful and offer a cross-reference between package, class, method, and pages.

By saying all these wonderful things about this book, I do not mean it is a perfect one. There are a few things that I wish the author would add, such as the enterprise API (RMI, EJB, etc.) and a brief description of usage or purpose for each method. Overall, I believe this is a great nut book worth our cracking.