Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Java Programming and Object-Oriented Application Development

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I'm about halfway through this book, and I am not impressed. I don't feel that the author follows good programming practices. Chapter 5 is a particular sore point. The examples in this chapter, which is the chapter on creating methods, show most of the work performed in the "main" function and only a few small details performed in subordinate methods. This is absolutely not the way programs should be designed. Even worse, some of the examples and some of the exercises use a class named NumberFormat. NumberFormat is an abstract base class that isn't intended to be directly used in applications, and his examples won't even compile with my version of Java because it won't allow the use of abstract base classes!

The example MusicWorldApp8 in chapter 8, with a main method that rambles on for 4 pages and over 30 local variables, is a terrible example of programming style. I don't know if the author was just being lazy or if he really doesn't know how to properly design programs.

I also feel that the book is overly wordy. There are more concise ways of explaining topics, so that reading the book wouldn't be so tedious.

This book provides a clear and concise description of important concepts about programming in general and the Java programming language. I have found it a great tool to get me started. I only wish it had better descriptions of the more complicated concepts, more charts that had important methods (rather than referring you to Oracles API), and clarified which classes and methods would actual be useful in an actual programming setting versus as simple learning tools.

Great way to learn the language though.

Robert Kenneth Perlstein

The text gives a thorough introduction to Java. Giving both the graphics and the numerical features. No prior knowledge of object oriented programming is assumed by the reader.

Hopefully you should find Java to be elegant, if you already know another language. The discourse goes into the object oriented nature of the classes. To be sure, if you know C, then having "all classes all the time" can initially seem overweight or overly complex. But the point is that Java, as an OO language, can let you code far more difficult and lengthy programs than a procedural language like C.

At the graphics level, the book lets you rapidly go into making simple programs that put up windows with various types of widgets. Straightforward. Though the layout managers in standard java are a little primitive. But at the level of treatment in the book, it may be hard to see this.