Early Adopter J2SE 1.4 by James Hart (Wrox)

[Johannes de Jong]

<pre>Author/s : James Hart
Publisher : Wrox
Category : Misc. Java
Review by : Thomas Paul - Bartender, November 2001</pre>
This book, as part of the Wrox “Early Adopter” series, explains some of the new features of J2SE 1.4. This new version of Java has many improvements over prior versions and also contains quite a bit of added functionality.
The book is very well done and gives excellent examples of some of this new functionality. However some new features have been left out including print service and some AWT and Swing enhancements. The information included, however, covers some of the more complex features of this release.
The book starts with excellent coverage of the new I/O features and the Java Network Launch Protocol (JNLP). The chapter on XML, however, seems unnecessary. Although this version of Java is the first to include XML support, the JAXP, SAX, and DOM information is not new and is readily available from many published sources. The author’s coverage of enhancements to the java.util package (especially regular expressions) is very good. The chapter on language enhancements is a bit confusing because the author starts the chapter with items that are not included in this release. This information would have been better placed in a separate appendix. The book ends with a section on possible enhancements for the next release of Java. The section on JAXB will be good news for many developers since it is available as an early access release. The book does not contain an index.
Anyone interested in the new features of Java will find this book very useful.
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[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: Johannes de Jong ]