16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A confusing book, November 2, 2003
By A Customer
I used this book for a beginning Java programming class. I have no idea why they chose this one over the thousands of other possible introductory books available. First of all, it's just poorly written. Here's an example from a section that introduces input dialog boxes:
"There are two components or arguments for the showInputDialog() method, the parent component and the string component. The string component is composed of a string or icon to be displayed in the dialog box. When no parent component is used, the keyword null is substituted."
Well, what the heck is the parent component?? You've said there are two components, you define the first but then only say what happens if you leave out the second.
The book is rife with these sort of inconsistencies and errors. Also, the author uses an annoying method of explaining (such as it is) concepts using code abstracts, then has you type in examples from scratch. She does this using a confusing step by step; type this - put the cursor here - now type this, process. You don't get a clear picture of the entire example until you have typed it all into an editor. Worse, you reuse your previous examples by having to delete sections and input new sections. This is very error prone. Then all she says is "run the program and observe the result".
It would have been much better if she had just listed the entire code example and said "copy this". The space spent in the step by step typing (probably amouts to a good 1/3 of the entire 663 pages) would have been better spent with an explanation of what the code you just typed in did and why.
There is no example code on the CD (or online) like just about every other coding book uses. Granted, I might become a better typist by inputting all the examples myself, but it makes using this text very slow and cumbersome.
Finally, it just doesn't seem like they put a lot of effort into the book. The best they can do to present concepts is code snippets, a few tables and some (small!) screenshots. Not one chart or diagram to illustrate how anything fits together. I counted maybe 6 flowcharts in the section on loops. That's maybe a half-hour's work in Visio... big deal. Granted, a lot of diagrams in tech books are page-filling fluff, but they do occasionally help to summarize a concept.
Avoid this book if you are looking for a text on your own. If you are taking a class using this one, I'd copy all of these poor reviews and forward them to your school and request that they choose another title.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not good enough for a second edition, September 24, 2002
This book has nice stuff to read especially for beginners. BUT there are too many typos and they are in the coding and in the explanation. Tiny typos that make your program not compile. And what you do for an hour is looking for your mistakes. I was confused big time and had to ask programmers to help me out.
Additionally, the way she explains her examples are a little bit confusing. She tears them apart as if they are separate small programs and then at the end she will ask you to write the remaining of the code yourself by following her directions. She won't show the whole program in the book, you have to accurately follow her directions in order to input the information in the right place. I ended up reading the chapter three times and correcting her typos while I was reading. Though my review might not be that good, the book still has some nice things in it. I learnt how to do nice stuff (though I never programmed before) and her typos were as debugging exercises for me. Her Java Programming first edition book, contains less typos and better arrangement of the information. But there are no extra chapters that she added in the second edition.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Do NOT buy this book!, March 22, 2009
This review is from: Java Programming (Paperback)
This has to be the worst book in programming I have ever seen! I am taking a Java course at the moment and I can not understand why this book was chosen as the textbook. It's a good thing that I am not trying to learn Java for the first time, but only to review what I learned years ago!
First, the explanations are horrible, when they are given at all. When describing new methods, each parameter is explained, but there are no examples of how to use them and what they mean. This was especially obvious in the chapter on drawing objects. Pictures describing what the parameters meant were critical! I had to go to the Internet to figure out how to use the parameters in drawArc.
Next, telling me where to put the insertion point when making additions to code is completely ridiculous. Just show me what to type and let me figure out how to do it! A picture of the code with the new additions in bold is all that is required. But trying to figure out exactly what the changed code looks like is virtually impossible because it is interspersed with the "directions" for how to add it.
Last, the exercises at the end of each chapter are horrible. Anyone who would actually code this way would be laughed out of the industry. A "set" method would never query the user for a data value. This violates the whole Model-View-Controller paradigm. This textbook is teaching bad programming practices! Some of the exercises are impossible to actually code as written because pieces required to finish the exercise are not actually specified.
I do not understand how Course Technology, which has a fairly good reputation when it comes to technical textbooks, would waste any time on this.
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