Customer Reviews

Client/Server Data Access With Java and XML

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this book because of it's title. I also own Chang and Harkey's Java and CORBA books, which are better than this. The title is misleading. It is not until almost 400 pages into the book that XML is introduced. And the content is all too brief. Most of the book looks like cut and pastes from Chang and Harkey's other Client Server books. The book is over 500 pages long, using huge fonts and page after page of example code and API references. It is disappointing that there is not a decent XML & Java book on the market. I guess I will have to wait and see if O'Reilly publishes one, or at least a XML in a Nutshell.

Had a look at it the other day at the Borders. Covers almost all the technologies associated with WEB development in a nice way with sample code that demonstrate each technology. It's a puzzle why the title is what it is. It's misleading!

xml/java combination is treated in only around 80 pages. The rest is stndard java client server, applet, servlet, JDBC etc., Buy only as a general purpose Java book and not as a XML/Java reference.

I bought this book because of its appealing book title. After opening the book, I found it merely a stack of disjointed materials. It lacks any real, in-depth example. The coverage is quite board but not integrated. If you want to have a quick introduction or tutorial of Client/Server data access with Java, it is the book for you. APIs are clearly listed out there; it is, however, not useful as no appropriate example demonstrated.

There's a lot of good information in here, but it really isn't all it should be. The quality of the writing is a tad erratic, chapters are padded out with long lists of methods etc which would be better consigned to an appendix.

It has feel of a book which has been thrown together in a hurry. Some of the sample programs are poorly documented and difficult to understand. I'm not sure the writers really knew who their target audience were; some of the Java text, for example, is very basic but other parts of it are difficult, but there's not a logical step-by-step progression. The book is really a bit of a rag-bag. That said, there's a lot of good stuff in here, but it's hard work finding it sometimes.

I bought this book to gain the fundementals of the new breed of client/server systems. The value of this book is that it argues that Java and XML will revolutionize the data interchange and data presentation. From this perspective, I think it makes it's case.

BUT, much to my amazement, I found most of the examples(code)(programming constraints) inconsequentially and almost irritatingly organized throughout the book, as it assumes you have some java programming under your belt which I do not.

There are some great points to this book. $50 is steep, but then it does manage to give you a fundemental understanding of how Java and XML may prove the most common tools in future web endeavors.

I bought the book because I was interested in XML. To my disappointment, the book seems to be a heap of material that I had found through search on the internet. You can easily find more insightful stuff on the web. If you are paying for the book, you are only paying the author for finding the material. The authors should have explored on teaching readers about how to skillfully use the new technologies. To me this book is a bunch of material my secretary could have put together.

"Broad overview" is right. The amount of material the authors try to cover is staggering, and, as such, the coverage is very thin. The title is slightly misleading -- the first three-fourths of the book are Java client/server and distributed objects overviews, and the last quarter deals with XML, tying it together and "futures." This is basically a bunch of API's bound together -- JDBC, SQLJ, RMI, CORBA, XML, DHTML with a "Hello, World" for each. The API's are often wrong (cut and paste errors from previous sections-- look at Externalizable and Serializable) and the code samples are obviously untested. Don't expect master ANY of these technologies from this book. You'd be better off assembling white papers off the Cetus web site on these technologies. Quite a disappointment coming from Harkey.

This is the first book which gave me a whole picture of client/server programming with Java,Java applet, Java serverlet, JDBC, RMI, JAVA ORB and XML. The author used a common sample which were implemented by the above techniques so that you can compare among them and have a good taste on the pros and cons of each. I strongly recommend this book to any web developers.

The coverage is too broad. I was hoping to buy a book about XML and how it could be used with Java. What I got was long winded discussions about various Java technologies with trivial examples and lots of pages of API. If your a management type interested in obtaining a vague understanding of JDBC, RMI, Servlets (excellent new book by Jason Hunter, BTW, so you know I'm not just another cynical programmer), Beans, etc., this book might be all right. If your a developer looking to get some decent technical information, look somewhere else.