Customer Reviews

Java 1.1 Unleashed

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

 

 

This book is a real disappointment. I'm returning my copy for a refund. It came out before 1.1 was released, although the cover claims that 1.1 is in it. I paid $49.99, which is the price printed on the back cover, so I'm not sure how Amazon came up with $59.00 as the list price. The book is written by many authors (one per chapter) and the chapters don't flow, often overlap and sometimes repeat earlier material. This a warmed over 1.0 book, despite the cover's claim to be completely updated and revised. Look elsewhere!

This book is not for beginners at all. It's more of a reference book. This book doesn't even give examples to play around with so you can learn how to do it. This book doesn't cover the basics and is not worth 50 dollars.

I've been a professional developer for about 7 years now so learning new languages is par for the course. It's usually not a difficult task. The real challenge with Java, however, is not in the language itself, the syntax and reserve words can be learned in a day or so, but rather with the (at this point) sprawling API's that seem to proliferate like nothing before. Add to this the fundamental changes in the design of the language between JDK 1.0 and JDK 1.1, particularly in the area of event handling, further seem to complicate the entry into full language usage. Java Unleashed, in my opinion, covers as many of the various java topics, from Applet programming, to JDBC, to the new AWT and delegation model, as well as discussing the emerging JavaOS and JavaBeans models, in a fairly in-depth, easy to read manner. Each of the topics covered in the book could (in most cases, does) have a book dedicated to that particular topic. These books are going to be more detailed than what you are getting in Java Unleashed, but nonetheless, Unleashed does (as always, the quality of the series as a whole is outstanding) their usually fine job of balancing depth versus information overload considering the space allowed to each topic. (The book weighs in at 1500 pages or something like that, so it's a stiff read all the way through.) Again it's the balance between covering a wide range of topics and the depth of detail about each of those topics that makes the Unleashed series, in most cases, the best books on the market. You may find highly targeted books that will deal with each of the topics in greater detail, but at the complete neglect of other areas. Unleashed gives the reader enough information in the various areas so as to begin to utilize the knowledge effectively, providing more than a mere 'launching point' for further studies, but rather, detailed, in-depth (if not *totally* complete) coverage of seemingly *every* aspect of the sprawling groups of related Java technologies.

The Unleashed series are often very good. This one is certainly an exception. It covers a lot of ground but doesn't really go deep enough into absolutely anything. It was also written by many authors and one has a general feeling that the entire thing was just put together in great hurry. The book is inconsistent and repeats itself time and time again. There are certainly a number of better choices around.

This book serves as a very good reference book for java programmers. It's more indepth compared with "Core Java Volumn II- advanced features". For instance, on JDBC section "Core Java" had very basic and little info on it.

This is a great overview of Java, in general, as well as the newer 1.1 features. Useful at all levels.

This is a very good book to gain a broad overview of Java 1.1. The chapter on multithreading was extremely well done. After reading it, I got sharp feelings of anxiety realizing that some of the pitfalls described were probably lurking in my code. In addition, it covers hard to find topics like RMI, the Reflection package, as well as many others. In short, I was impressed with this book as well as the scope and depth of what it covered.