Customer Reviews

Advanced Java Networking (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I saw that this book's second edition was published in April/2000 but unfortunately the new author (Steflik, d) has just put his name on the book, 'cos as I could see in the chapter 6 the book hasn't been updated.

The chapter 6 describes Java IDL as a simple IDL to Java mapping. But nowadays Java IDL is a full ORB/IIOP implementation. The examples were done using Sun's NEO and Imprise Visibroker ORBs. If the book had been updated it'd be natural to write the examples using the Java IDL CORBA implementation from JDK 1.3.

Indeed, the author says :

"The examples that follows was made using JDK 1.3, JDBC 2.0, and the Imprise Visibroker ORB."

I think that what the new author has done is just use the UNIX sed command like :

$ sed "s/JDK 1.1/JDK 1.3/g" prashant'sbook.txt

rodela@bigfoot.com

Chapter 5, Java RMI, Callbacks: callbacks are a tricky part of RMI usage. I was hoping that the book would be helpful...

The callback example shown in the book is not on the CD. That may not be a bad thing as the code shown doesnt work. On page 148 the authors show a class that extends an interface - this is not legal java syntax. On page 149 they have class which extends the rmi.remote class. However, this is an interface and cannot be extended, only implemented.

I havent "drilled down" to this level on the other topics, but this is a disappointment.

Don't buy this book. I found a lot of errors in this book. I have to make some adjustments to the examples in the book to get them compiled. I will look for other Java networking programming book.

This is a good introductory book on Java networking, since it covers all the APIs, giving a good presentation of them, without going too much into details, however.

The chapter on network management (JMX), my goal on purchasing the book, is outdated and useless, since it covers a deprecated API, JMAPI. So the "completely updated" message from the editors is somehow outdated.

There are 2 annoying things on the book. First , the code is repeated several times each time the authors add something to it. In one time they wanted to add just 2 lines of code and they repeated the previously printed 2 pages of code. Seems a waste of paper to me, or that they wanted to fill empty pages.

Second, every 10 tenth page they have the necessity to trash down C++ as a programming language. If Java is "the next big thing" for them, ok, fine, but C++ is a great tool for me, on different kind of applications, and there is no comparison here.

Buy it if you are new to Java networking, look elsewhere if you are looking for JMX.

Before buying this book, I think it's important to understand that this book is not intended to make you an expert on any particular networking technology. It is more intended to give you an overview of all of the networking options (eg RMI, JDBC, Sockets, IDL, JINI) available, so that you are capable of making informed decisions about which technology is the best to use in different situations.

The book does an excellent job at giving an overview of many different technologies. It gives you enough information to be able to use the technology all of those technologies, but doesn't give you enough information to make yourself an expert at all of them.

In addition, there's an overview of basic networking concepts such as TCP/IP and UDP.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to know more about what networking options are available, or to those who just want to play with different networking technologies.

This is a wateful book. I went through this book to work on an RMI project that i had undertaken. The RMI chapter has examples that are full of errors. The section on CALLBACKS is all wrong and just will not work correctly.

Absolute waste of money if you bought it.

I found myself having to skip through pages and pages of dumb analogies! Theses analogies were dumb and do not clear anything up. This book's code examples for the most part are full of syntax errors that could be harmful to beginners. The examples are also way of of date. All of the code is awt based not swing like it should be and like the book proclaimed from the outset. The only swing in this book is a few notes scattered in the book that say basically "use swing when you write this code." So why didn't the author use swing to write the code? I think the rewrite of this book is nothing more than a few notes added to the pages and syntax full code examples that are out of date and don't work.

Don't buy this book if you are a serious programmer and if you do please buy my copy.

This book covers an interesting area of Java, but the author didn't bother to test ANY of his code before printing, so "little" things like not declaring variables before using them makes compiling the code time consumming and tedious. Not to mention I bought the book because I didn't know very much about networking, which makes correcting some of the algorithm errors very difficult. UNLESS you are bored and want to fix hours of bugs find another book.

The examples are full of errors for starts...most of them are simple syntax errors, and that in itself does not warrent a terrible review. My real problem with the book is the authors do not know what they are talking about. The chapter on Java Beans is wrong. Not like the code doen't work wrong, but what they describe as a Java Bean is not a Java Bean, but a type of Java Beans. This is only one example. Also the book has an annoying habit of putting many examples in AWT and Swing. This might just be me, but I could really care less. I don't know how to make applets, and don't want to, I want to know how to make a networked application independant of the UI.
Finally the authors insane predictions of the future of the Java Language are both annoying, and shows their misunderstanding of the Java Language.

I am a java programmer interested in back end java applications, I found that the use of AWT was annoying, I don't know it, and don't want to know it. If you are familiar with java, or know awt this is a decent book, but unless you are into AWT be prepared to extract any useful information out of the examples.