Customer Reviews

Java After Hours: 10 Projects You'll Never Do at Work

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

 

 

This book is for experienced Java programmers that don't need a rehash of the basics and want to try some interesting projects as well as learn some new techniques and tricks such as sending JPEGs back from a web server, grabbing web pages from Java code, creating drop shadows in Java2D, using online filters, and controlling any other program robotically.

This book contains 10 projects, along with some minor projects used for illustration purposes. One of these subprojects builds an entire web server you can run from your desktop, given an Internet connection and a fixed IP address, which you probably have if you have a broadband connection. The following is a summary of the book's contents:

Chapter 1: Aquarium-- A multithreaded fish-swimming project with fish that swim realistically against a bubbly background.

Chapter 2: Slapshot -- A multithreaded hockey game that moves. You play against the computer and set the speed. And when you set the speed in the upper 90s, you've got a good chance of losing.

Chapter 3: The Graphicizer-- An image-editing and conversion tool. This one lets you read in JPG, PNG, or GIF files and save images in JPG or PNG format. You can work with images pixel by pixel, embossing them, sharpening them, brightening them, blurring them, reducing them, and so on. And you can even undo the most recent change.

Chapter 4: Painter-- Lets you draw your own images from scratch--ellipses, rectangles, lines, and so on. You can even draw freehand with the mouse. You can also draw each shape open or filled, using a texture fill, a solid color fill, or a gradient fill. You can draw text. You can give shapes a drop shadow, or make them transparent. You can draw using thin lines or thick lines. You can set the drawing color. And not only can you save your work when done, you can also read in images and work on them, annotating them with text or adding your own graphics.

Chapter 5: The Chat project-- In this project you create your own private Internet chat room that will keep you in touch with anyone over the Internet. All you need is Internet access and a Java-enabled web server. You can have as many people in your chat room as you like. What they type, you can see, and what you type, they can see. Type all you like--all you're paying for is the local Internet connection.

Chapter 6: WebLogger-- Log access to your website. This project lets you log users who access your website by access time, authentication type, username (if they've logged in), user IP address, the URL they accessed on your site, their browser type, the milliseconds they were there for, and so on. All without their knowledge.

Chapter 7: The Robot project-- This interesting project lets you control any other program by remote control; just tell it what to do. You can send text to the other program you're controlling. You can use the ALT and CNTL keys. You can send tab characters, the Enter key, or the ESC key. You can also use the mouse--just enter the screen location (in pixels) where you want the mouse to move to. Then click the mouse, right-click it, or double-click it. You can also take screen captures. If you want to automate working with any program, the Robot will do it.

Chapter 8: The Browser project-- This project lets you create a fully featured browser that subclasses Microsoft Internet Explorer in your Java applications.

Chapter 9: The Intercom project-- This project lets two people type across the Internet. You just start up the project, connect with the click of a button, and you've got your own connection: Everything you type into the Intercom, the other use can see, and everything the other user types, you can see. This one is a client/server application and connects directly across the Internet using its own protocol--unlike the Chat project, no Java-enabled web server is needed here at all.

Chapter 10: The Forecaster project-- Displays a four-day temperature forecast for your area, starting with today's high and low temperatures. All you've got to do is to tell the Forecaster your ZIP Code, and it'll give you the forecast by reading its data from the National Weather Service and sending a JPEG image from the server back to the browser.

I'm a Java multimedia programmer, and I found this an interesting collection of projects and ideas for games and utilities I am working on. It is much more interesting than all of those enterprise Java books that are necessary for getting stuff done at work, but are not that inspiring. I recommend this project-based book to anyone curious about just what can be done with Java.

Veteran author Holzner has come forth with a deliberately quirky book. It has an informal choice of Java programming topics, where these are unlikely to be seen in other, more comprehensive and conventional Java texts. Plus, Holzner uses the latest major release, Java 1.5.

To be sure, you really must have some nodding acquaintance with Java. Not necessarily 1.5, mind you. But part of the book's focus is that it does not waste your time going over basic issues like syntax and the core classes.

The book exposes you to more than just the standard Java 1.5 distribution from Sun. You should already know that the latter has two sets of widgets - the original AWT and the newer Swing, where Swing is often considered to be better than AWT. But there is another widget toolkit, called SWT. Freely offered by IBM. It has been well received by many Java programmers as being superior to AWT and Swing. In Chapter 8, on making a custom web browser, for example, Holzner shows the virtues of SWT. Purely in terms of broadening your Java experience, it is worth checking SWT out.

Holzner also puts in a strong plug for Eclipse. An Integrated Development Environment that is free and open source. (It also originated from IBM.) It offers the promise of a very nice, high productivity context in which to code your Java. Its proponents suggest that Eclipse and Java can match any Microsoft IDE for coding VB.NET or C#.

You see, if you treat the book correctly, it's not the topics themselves that are the most important items. Don't get me wrong. They are certainly interesting in their own right. Rather, it's the broadening of your knowledge en route that is the book's main attraction.

In most tech language tutorials and how-to articles, you end up getting sample programs and projects that are "formal" or work-related. But sometimes you learn more about a language if you can work on fun stuff. Steven Holzner moves into that territory in the book Java After Hours. There's some stuff in here I'm going to mess around with...

Contents: Introduction; Making Fish Swim in the Multithreaded Aquarium; Slapshot! The Interactive Hockey Game; The Graphicizer Image-Editing and Conversion Tool; Creating Stunning Graphics with Painter; Chatting on the Internet with the Chat Room; Who's There? Logging Access to your Website with WebLogger; Running Any Program via Remote Control with the Robot; Creating a Custom Web Browser in Java: The Browser Project; Typing Across the Internet: The Intercom Project; Getting a Graphical Weather Forecast: The Forecaster Project; Index

I'll admit that I have to give high marks to any book that mixes Java and my favorite sport... hockey! :)

Seriously, Holzner does some interesting things that make this book stand out. By using projects and examples that are more personal and "fun" in nature, it's much more likely that the reader will become absorbed in the material and pick up the particular concepts almost without trying. He also uses projects that are graphical in nature instead of relying on cold, dry server-based routines that just print some words on the screen. It's one thing to learn about multithreading by trying to create "processes" that can run concurrently. It's a whole different learning experience when the threads are fish in an aquarium, and you can truly watch the threads run and interact. This is something you don't see often in most books today. And when you get done with each chapter, you actually have something visible you can look back at and enjoy.

This isn't a book to get if you are looking to learn Java from the ground up. There's no "from A to Z" progression through the language. But if you've already learned Java and are looking to learn some new techniques and concepts, this is an excellent "next step" to take in your Java journey...

This is a fun book to advance your programming and Java skills a bit.

The strength of this book is not that it has complete code for 10 projects. It is that each of these projects have nearly unlimited potential for adding in features.

Take the aquarium for instance. I added in a simple GUI popup to control how many fish, their individual speeds, supports unlimited fish photos, change backgrounds, add in whales, sharks, dolphins crabs, ect. In addition, the shark can randomly pick a fish every so often and eat it, along with sounds from Jaws. Next I am going to add in fisherman and divers.

The great thing is that all of the projects are this way. Even if you are not inclined to etend the projects, there is still alot to learn from the basic projects.

There is complete source code on the books web site. BTW, the Aquarium does not feature multithreaded fish. Each fish is not a thread. There is exactly one explicit thread in the program.

This is an ok book for people that want to learn what they can do with Java. The projects are explained well. I didn't think any of the projects were that exciting

I can easily understand how Steven Holzner manages to write so many books in so many diffent subjects.. he knows extremely little about them all, and is a master only at hiding the superficiality of his skills and knowledle.
Take this book for example. Nice cover, cool title, great overall idea for a technical book: learning advanced Java programming techniques while playing with some "unconventional" and "fun-oriented" applications..the best way to learn.. learn by doing and by doing something fun.. Too bad the author is not up to the task. The program he presents in this book are mostly horribly insignificant. To give you an idea of what I mean by that one of the projects, pompously called "weblogger" is nothing more than a simple, stinky web-app filter printing a line of text for every request to your webapp. Basically nothing more than your "hello world" filter. Just very few of the projects deserve more attention and even for those the author quicky glosses over the most interesting parts leaving you alone to figure out the code. And the code, the code.. well the level is pretty the one you would expect from a good college student who has had a couple of semester of Java programming. I understand well mr Holzner because I am kind of an eclectic learner myself, I like to study and tinker with different areas and technologies, only I don't have the "bronze face" (as we say here in Italy) to sell myself as an expert in a field where I have just superficially played.
Someone please find a decent job for this guy, so he will stop polluting the world with his books at the expense of many wasted tree and many more naive readers.
If you 're interested in some high quality, elegant, professional level java code examples give a try to:
Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
No shiny book cover, no marketing hype, no cool sounding app names but you will surely learn a lot from that book. No wonder, it's from a real tech author, not an amateur with good marketing sense.

Some of the projects use old obsolete AWT extensively. Hello - Java Swing is the way to do GUI's. Since JDK 1.4 in 2002 reading images is best done with ImageIO.read(..) not using the old AWT media tracker. The html examples use capitals, e.g. BODY not the current approved xhtml body tag. I can't put in the angle brackets since it confuses the browser.

I like several of the ideas; I thought hockey would be good, but it is pong.

The robot and web browser are very interesting ideas. You can really think of things to do with these.

The ideas and examples would have given this book a higher rating but there were a couple problems that I list below.

Bad ideas of the writer; first is listing the main functions for class. First the method names and parameters and return types doesn't really help. It just took up space.

Second bad thing is the way code is shown in the book, here are pieces of the code, now filling in other pieces, and just continuing along those lines. I would prefer the entire program and list the line numbers, in writing just identify the line numbers.

I think every chapter would be about a fifth the size if the code didn't extend so long and the class methods were delete.

This book isn't as fun to read as it might tell you. I try to work on a project and end up getting confused as to which class I'm working on, or where everything fits together. It isn't easy to follow and it just glides through things nonchalantly, but doesn't bother to give a finished product that I can find.

I tried the beginners fish aquarium class, but couldn't get too far because of formatting. Tried the slapshot game and got lost as to which class was which and which code went where. It's great if you want something to sit on your shelf and look pretty, maybe for moderate reference, but not practical or easy enough to read. And this is coming from someone who has read many types of these books in the past.