Author/s : Joel Murach
Publisher : Mike Murach & Associates
Category :
Advanced Java
Review by : Campbell Ritchie
Rating : 8 horseshoes
Whenever reviewing a book, consider which audience and purpose it's intended for. This book is obviously for experienced people (Murach produce a "Beginning" book, too) who wish to migrate to Java™ programming from another language, and so as to speed up coding teaches both Java™ and NetBeans. It fortunately makes no claim to be comprehensive; it clearly focuses on certain classes (see page 366), expecting readers to find other topics for themselves.
The book follows the paired pages format often used by Murach, wherever the length of the code fragments permits. It starts with basic syntax, then object-orientation, specialised classes, GUIs, data access, threading and deployment with jar files. Collections and exceptions are included amongst those "specialised classes". I was especially pleased to see that data validation, using error messages was introduced early in the book, and that the exceptions section teaches how to throw Exceptions for incorrect input, as well as how to catch them.
The GUIs are created with the NetBeans GUI builder; this allows one to set up the display very quickly without necessarily knowing all the code. It also shows real object-oriented event handling.
This book moves very fast and would be particularly on to a course, where an instructor can supply more explanations. I would have preferred to see "for further reading" and references to basic principles e.g. Object-orientation.
I found a few errors, eg precedence of ! (p117) Character and Hashtable misspelt (p401, 396).
A good book I'm pleased I've read.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com