Customer Reviews

Jython Essentials (O'Reilly Scripting)

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

 

 

I found the book to be informative in learning JPython, but it seemed to have ignored the most practical use-cases for JPython, light scripting and unit testing, and kept suggesting JPython as an alternative for working in Java. In addition, I felt the book was poorly (or boringly) written and that the authors failed to draw on any significant amount of experience in writing the book.

I would have preferred a book that wrote of JPython as a scripting language for Java and that offered advice on how best to leverage JPython for this purpose. I recommend taking a hard look at the other titles before purchasing this one.

OK, I'm adding a paragraph to this review after owning the book for a few weeks. It IS a very helpful book and I'm raising my rating from 2 to 4 stars. Perhaps I was thrown off at first by the succinctness of the text, but I've come to find that it makes it a great reference book. I'm already a half-way experienced programmer and do not need the filler and the explanation of concepts that thicker books probably provide.

Also, there is a helpful section on unit testing which I'd missed (It wasn't placed very well in the book) and python is a flexible enough language that someone should be able to figure out different ways to unit test without the section.

The book is definitely helpful in understanding how Jython works, but the explanations should be made in a much more user-friendly way with more examples. Often I found myself left in the fog. The book sometimes assumes things without explaining. For instance, for simple functions like the following (p. 113):

>> import jarray
>> jarray.array(['crystal', 'ball'],java.lang.String)

you need to import java.lang.String before calling it. I didn't know that but the book doesn't explain that.

Also the book doesn't make clear that to import some java classes you have to include .jar file in the sys.path. It does mention .jar files but should make clear and emphasize that you must include it as a necessary step and also show how to do that. It took me a lot of agonizing and asking around to finally figure these out.

This text has good coverage of the language features, but the presentation and organization is poor. If you're a Java developer looking to pick up jython quickly, I'd suggest "Jython for Java Programmers" instead.

For someone who's been working in Cpython 1.5 thru 2.1, the 1st 5 chapters are an excellent, succinct language refresher and intro to new features in 2.2: nested scopes, generators, etc.

This book does assume pretty solid grounding in python. If you don't have that, start with:

Chun: Core Python
Lutz: Learning Python
or Harms/McDonald: Quick Python

This is a good overall guide to jython and I think it is as good as all the rest of the nutshell books are.

This great reference is well organized and remarkably readable. I can't remember the last time I saw a guide this clearly writen. If you're working in Jython, you'll want to keep this book within arms reach. If you aren't working in Jython...well, why are you reading this review?