Customer Reviews

Fundamental Networking in Java

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

 

 

This book describes its subject from the basics of the underlying IP networking technologies (including both TCP and UDP) all the way up through the "traditional" socket classes to the new Channel classes.

Personally I particularly benefitted from the discussion of channels and the rest of the NIO (New IO) package, but I believe that the solid coverage of Java networking basics in tandem with the comprehensive description of the available libraries makes this both a good introductory text and a good reference to the more obscure niches. It helps that while there are quite a few reference tables and lengthy discussion sections this is still a hands-on book with plenty of code examples.

Not quite suitable for a complete Java beginner - but any novice developer with a grip on syntax and the core API would benefit from this.

I have never read a more concise but clearly written technical book, and the code looks beautiful too. Pretty much every software engineer needs this book.

If you absolutely know what you are doing it reduces the solution time for most known problems from hours to minutes. If you are not all that clued up about IP but want/need to be, this is the book. Fundamental Networking in Java could just as easily be just called Fundamental Networking.

I expect this book will become the standard text in Software Engineering courses on Networking. And if your course has a different text, this book is probably a better choice. It will be one of the very few textbooks that will survive your transition into the working world.

And the beauty of this book is that because it is written in crystal clear english it is also very useful to a much wider audience - technology manager, business analyst, etcetera.

This book is what Im finding to develop server applications with Java language, it is filling the market gap.

This is an excellent book on Networking in Java. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn sockets, TCP/IP and UDP. Just make sure you have the API available when you're reading this book.

As least we know that author knows how to switch fonts, his choice however is in a blatant violation of a common standard for human perception. Can this be really an issue, not the technical content? Donald Knuth once wrote in his Metafont book Computers & Typesetting, Volume C: The Metafont Book (Book v) that whoever studies font designs, has to face the probability that "...the medium will intrude on the messages which you read." Maybe I am infected as well, I studied the Metafont-book, I did a lot.

Mr. Pitt uses a mish/mush of ancient digits, overhanging/underhanging, little small caps letters with extreme spacing, looking smaller than the small letters in his main font, "I" to be confused with "1", identical in shape and size in two different fonts! The capitol letter height is literally like the small letter in his regular font. The spacing of the small-cap font used to acronyms is so excessive, that every name appears as a series of alone standing letters. For example the sentence "In IPV6 an IP address is a 128-bit number" on page 10 looks like:

"In I P V 6 an I P address is a 128-bit number"

with all these capitol letter in size like the "a" in "an", with huge 6 overhanging, small "12" like a small letter and the tall "8" overhanging. Imagine paragraphs with numerous acronyms, which are very frequent in this book. For example, two paragraphs on page 14 contain "J D K 1.4", "I P V 4" and "I P V 6" not less than 28(!!) times, in such wide spacing. This is outright ridiculous.

Bizarre are numbers. Showed in the "small caps font" the null "0" is like a perfect small "o", very round, contrasted with the underhanging "5", "3" or "9" and overhanging "6" or "8". Even more bizarre are hexadecimal values showed with proportional font, in which "ffff"'s are extremely narrow and attached to each other, as opposed to the extra wide "o" circle meaning zero. This would look fine in an illustrated work of fiction, or in a 19th century facsimile, but has no place in a technical text.

To make the appearance even more bizarre, author uses a gargantuan monospaced letters for code snippets, which can otherwise be found only in a 1st grade 'abc'-reading books, or in books for elderly. Of course, this opinion might be subjective, but here is comes: The overall appearance is so incongruous, that for me a normal reading process is not possible. I feel disrupted and impacted severely in my desperate attempts to overcome the visual impediment.

But wait, there is more: Many of the Java code snippets have inconsistent spacing or are mistyped, lacking spaces and thus invalid as Java. Examples:

Page 254:
ByteArrayOutputStreambaos should be "ByteArrayOutputStream baos"
DataOutputStreamdos should be "DataOutputStream dos"
Page 74:
DataInputStreamdataIn should be "DataInputStream dataIn"

etc. etc, many more such examples could be found. On page 14 author even forgot to switch the font for the code fragment on time! The switch occurs inside of a "while loop," which is part in normal size, before it switches into the gargantuan font. Compare this chaos to the beautifully presented book by Calvert, Donahoo TCP/IP Sockets in Java, Second Edition: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Morgan Kaufman) on a similar subject.

Incomplete is also index and glossary in this book. My knowledge about networking details is sketchy at best. I took the book to learn about networking. Author quotes very often RFC standards, e.g. RFC 793 Par. 3.4 (of course in his goulash style: "R F C" (tiny all caps with huge spacing) "793" all under-hanging, thin calligraphic paragraph sign and "3" "4" both under-hanging with a dot in the middle of them,) but he never quotes RFC in his index, glossary or in the bibliography. I lack the knowledge of what precisely is RFC!

Still, with all these issues, for a reader with a superficial knowledge of networking, such as myself, this book provides a great deal of valuable information and teaching. Why in heavens the venerable house of Springer Verlag has not provided this author with guidance in typesetting aesthetics and a review?

Goulash is good on the Hungarian Pushta or in the kitchen. Avoid it in a technical text.