Customer Reviews

Java 6 Platform Revealed

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

 

 

This is a very first introduction to the upcoming Java 6 Standard Edition (Mustang). The book is based on the Java 6 Drop 84/85 as of May 2006 (see page xvi) and is somewhat aware of drop 88 (see page 114). Reading it saves you the work of wading yourself through the new API and make your own comparisons.

John Zukowski's Java 6 is well organized and written in a very comprehensible style. The author's long track record of Java books clearly shows. Each chapter summarizes the changes/additions to the api by counting the relevant interfaces, classes, enums and throwables on a per package basis.

Seven out of the ten chapters treat the new features in a self contained and sufficiently complete introduction. The three exceptions are XML related technologies and here especially web services. They moved into the standard Java distribution. These are technologies that need a many hundred pages introduction - so be prepared to find here only hints and not a complete treatment. This is perfectly fined since such books exist already. On the other hand Java annotations are around since Java 5 SE. Here John Zukowski explicity repeats the achievements of the previous version and contrasts the new additions to it.

In summary I can wholeheartedly recommend this book as a quick start into the upcoming standard Java edition.

The title of this review pretty much says it all. Not a good book, though I suppose necessary at the time. I was really hoping for a follow up from O'Reilly to their excellent "Java 1.5 Tiger - A Developer's Notebook". As the man said "I just need the facts ..."

You'll love this book if you are already a pro up through the current Java release and don't want to - once again - wade through Gary Cornell's excellent but complete treatise on the Java language just to figure out what is new to the language in Java 6. You'll hate this book if you want to learn Java for the first time, starting with Java 6, and decide to start with this book. Zukowski assumes you know the current state of all of the APIs he is talking about and just want to know what is new. He does an excellent job explaining what has changed and shores up his explanations with non-trivial examples. I highly recommend it to current Java programmers. If you are not already a Java programmer, wait for Horstmann and Cornell's "Core Java, Volume I-Fundamentals (8th Edition)" to be released in September and learn Java 6 and Java programming the right way and from scratch.

This great, little overview of a handful of the Java 6 features is a quick, easy read with some concrete examples. Definitely written for the mid-to-advanced audience out there, this should provide you with some core concepts and information about what's included in Mustang without going into painful detail.

What makes this Apress fall short of a 5 is the author's pick-and-choose nature of "in-depth" coverage. You can tell which topics the author likes to cover and which ones he just doesn't get into. It shows his core strengths and competencies, but it would have been nice to possibly have a co-author to cover some of the things he skimmed over and also some additional material.

Worth $40? I'm not sure. But I am happy that I got it. Being able to step away from the computer to study a little was valuable, and this book was a wonderful addition to my reading material.

O'Reilly has a a "Developer's Notebook" series that I love. This book is very similar however, the writing style, examples, and editing is much cleaner. I recommend this book to anyone who wants a book that describes the new features and changes to the Java language version 6. The author writes in a why that I was able to read the book cover/cover without falling asleep.

I learned a lot about he new version, what libraries to look for changes, and how major the changes are.

My plan is to look for other titles by John Zukowski.

This is a good high level look at the new features in Java 6. The page count is low enough at 220 to read through from beginning to end and get a good feel for what is new. This is not a deep bible type book though. You will need other references or dig in code experiments yourself. The JDBC 4.0 material for example is only 11 pages. The low page count is made that much the odder by the inclusion of some truly useless material: each chapter starts with two tables detailing the differences in number of classes, interfaces, enums, etc between Java 5 and 6. Really? Who cares that there was 8 interfaces in lang 5.0 and... 8 interfaces in lang 6.0? Still, this book should be read by developers wanting to take advantage of what Java 6 has to offer.

I am always skeptic about authors who appear too often in too many thousand page books, because the mass affects the class. This book is a perfect example where such page-spillage leads. It makes on me the impression of being an offspring of a side-job. Quickly thrown together, printed by the all too easy going Apress without any quality review, and put out for sale.

Some of the code pieces presented by the author are simply pitiful. My Evil-Favorite is the listing 2-6, the "Capacity limited linked blocking queue." Two pages of not commented drivel delivers than the following output on pages 26-29:

MapGot: Jun
Offering: Jun
MapRemoving: Jun
...etc. etc for almost... 4 pages removed for brevity

Yes, this "highly intellectual" output stretches for 4 pages! You see it correct, 4 pages of 3-lines each MapGot, Offering, MapRemoving, and on, and on, and on. This is embarrassing. I will not comment any further, because this would be a waste of time. We could go through errors, weakness in glossary and index, and several more such "clever" examples explaining, what exactly? That the author can compile code and run it?

Personally I find it a pity that this book is such a disappointment. I like very much the books dealing incrementally with Java updates, which sometimes are really huge. I am looking back at the exquisite book by Gregory M. Travis about JDK 1.4, and the so nicely made small "Java 1.5 Tiger" by David Flanagan and Brett McLaughlin. I second the opinion in one of the other reviews: I wish one of them would have released a book about the JDK 1.6 update.

The book is very well written and is laid out in an intuitive fashion. The organization and presentation of the new and expanded features of Java SE 6 made the information very easy to absorb and work with.

I'm usually pleased with apress titles, and if asked to pick books on a subject "sight unseen" would go with them because of that. This book is an exception, and I'm going to return it. It's a completely trivial cover of the material and so shallow that it's no better than available online stuff. And to price this lightweight a book at $40 is ridiculous.