Customer Reviews

Java Internationalization (Java Series)

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

 

 

This book is very dated. It covers the basics pretty well: ResourceBundles, DateFormatter, Locales, etc. However, there are several things I find disappointing about this book:

1) All the examples are mostly client side Java. Even the topic of internationalizing websites spends more time on Java applets. While this is Ok, I'm guessing most i18n work in Java these days is done for web applications.

2) There are better libraries/frameworks for dealing with Internationalization than the ones that come with Java: ICU4J and JodaTime to name a few. Since this book was written in 2001, these are not covered.

3) This book does not cover anything related to Java 1.5.

This book does a good job of handling localization issues with respect to java applications through the use of resource bundles, and native language UIs.

In my current project we are doing some very intensive XML processing with web content. Web content can be in any number of encodings and character sets, and we've had a decent number of problems when converting content from one encoding to another or from one character set to another.

I was hoping that this book would give very practical hints about how to handle/avoid/rectify character set conversion issues in java. However, the only mention of converting encodings/character sets claims that if you use the proper java.io class with the proper constructor arguments, java will wave it's magic wand and all is right with the world. I can tell you for a fact this isn't true. This was a big disappointment of this book.

There are three ways to handle internationalization of your Java applications. First, ignore it and give up all your non-English speaking customers. Second, write customized versions of your programs for each language you wish to support and live with a maintenance nightmare. Or third, take advantage of the many internationalization features built into Java. Fortunately, the internationalization features of Java are fairly simple to use and this book clearly explains how to apply them to your applications. The authors start with a description of the many writing systems in use through the world and discuss the many problems that these writing systems can cause for developers. The book then covers a wide range of topics:

* how to use resource bundles to isolate locale specific data

* formatting dates, numbers, and currency

* handling searching and sorting issues for non-Latin alphabets (Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, etc.) as well as special cases within the Latin alphabet (an "a" with an umlaut is sorted with "a" in German but after "z" in Swedish)

* handling languages such as Arabic and Hebrew that write from right to left

* designing graphical interfaces to handle any writing system

* building internationalized web sites

If you plan on using the internationalization features of Java then you will definitely want to start with this book. The book is written for the intermediate to advanced Java programmer who needs to develop internationalized applications. The authors assume that the reader is unfamiliar with the issues involved with developing internationalized applications. (...)

The authors do a very good job of clearly describing the challenges of writing a multi-lingual capable applications. They do so for both client-based and web-based applications. I learned more than I thought I would about non-English languages and how vastly they can differ from our own. The real find is in their coverage of Unicode, explaining what it hopes to achieve and how it impacts your Java programming.

I would say the next revision (if there's going to be one) would benefit by expanding font installation in other operating systems. Not too surprisingly, they cover only Windows, as it has the best unicode support today. However, TrueType support is possible on the Unixes, if you know how. I'd be curious to know how it would be possible on Mac OS X. The book would also benefit from expanded discussion on internationalizing web applications. It only covers display issues. The authors cite not wanting to cover issues surrounding web-based data entry and database operations because other authors discuss them, but those are relevant topics, IMO. After all, they discussed Swing-based data entry, so why not web forms? I was hoping for more complete coverage, as I am working on a I18N project now. But I'll have to hunt around for other books for the topics I could not read about here.

Overall, this book is a great buy. Modern software developers would be foolish to not familiarize themselves with the I18N APIs in today's global economy.

It's true that Deitsch's book offers little more subject matter than Sun's excellent Internationalization chapter of the Java tutorial at their web site. But it has the virues of being a book, which you can curl up with, thumb around in, and mark up. And it covers the Sun topics in more depth, with a wealth of examples.

Java is the programming language that built in language support from the ground up, and *Java Internationalization* tells you how to take advantage of this feature. If you are writing Java code for international markets, this is your one-stop shop for a complete textbook on the subject.

This book is a good review of internationalization in Java. It covers the basic topics like time & date format, string separation, property files, resource bundles, languages methods, etc.

My only complaint about the book is it really doesn't have any information that isn't already available on Sun's web site, and it seems that the most critical concepts have little or no examples while on the other hand, it gives detailed time & date format information for every language in the world; even Esperanto.

I wish the book had focused more on code and examples, and less on the locale specific details.

This book, being the only one of its sort, is the way to go if you need to internationalize your java application. The book covers the basics of internationalization on through more tricky elements, from locale sensitive string replacement on through web input methods.

While the book gives you insight into the design model of java i18n, it doesn't go into exacting super accurate detail. Likely the ever changing java api attributes to this.

The book is good, the examples are supurb. Just I found a few things (relating to input methods) that had me going to java.sun.com to find answers to.

Great book on I18N, but I believe some more detail could have been given on the gotchas of using Unicode. I still think it is worthy of 4 stars however.

There is very limited material on Java Internationalization. If you are new to internationalization then some chapters are a good read. There is a lot of digression on different languages, how they are written, how they are different, which is good read but does not really help you write better software. I would have expected more examples.

In their Java Internationalization, multi-lingual authors Andy Deitsch and David Czarnecki successfully collaborate to show Java users how to write software that is truly multi-lingual by employing Java's highly sophisticated, cutting-edge internationalization facilities. The days of English-only software are numbered and the demands of ecommerce and internationalized software apps for new generations of software development compel software writers to expand beyond the limitations of language boundaries. A very highly recommended addition to all Java reference collections, Java Internationalization is essential for Java developers to bring themselves fully up to speed on the new generation of software development and able to write software no longer limited or restricted by language and cultural boundaries.