Customer Reviews

Pro Jakarta Commons

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a must have book for Java Developers. I already have found many components/code that I can reuse to make my life easier. For example, the File Upload component is simple to use and saves a great amount of coding. The XML component (Digester) is fantastic! The author writes to the point and shows great examples. The examples on the Jakarta Commons website are lacking, so this is why this book is needed!

I was already familiar with the Jakarta Commons by the time I read this book, so I didn't get that much out of it. It is well written though, and full of good technical stuff.

If you are new to the Commons then I might recommend it to you; but the material in here is available from http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/index.html and it will stay 'fresh' on the website, as opposed to this book. I'd point you to there first. If you are looking for another 'roadmap' or organization of the material, then this book is for you.

If you are already familiar with the Jakarta Commons, pass on this book.

Mr. Harshad Oak did what usually open source developers don't.. write some good documentation. Jakarta commons has incomplete documentation. Now with author's work i'm able to develop code without the feel of "reinventing the weel".
The author did a very good job focusing on the right key-points of the jakarta commons api. It is very readable even for non native english speakers. I did rate five stars but i would rate it to 4.5 stars because i think that it is not completly exaustive. I would have enjoyed some deeper discussion about the commons api. But it could be seen in another way: a quick and not verbose starting point for using the commons library.
Anyway i did really enjoy my purchase.

Easy to use book, very clear examples. I now have better understanding of Jakarta Commons. Thanks Harshad Oak.

Jakarta Commons have done a superb job of harnessing the collective intellect and know-how of the great group of contributors who build them. I found Pro Jakarta Commons to be a great introduction to the commons classes. If you are like most working programmers,you will most likely need to use a few features in commons before you know much about them. Not only does the book do a very nice job of organizing the classes and methods in all of the commons packages, but more importantly, it gives you excellent examples to use many of them.

Mr. Oak does an amazing job of "getting down" on this material. Diagrams, tables and lots and lots of Java code examples make this handy and a valuable keeper of a book. By definition, once a common package leaves the sand box and becomes production ready, they strive to keep the interface backward compatible so these examples will serve you a good long while. It's also a very good read should one want to go cover to cover as the writing is clear and has that "just right" balance of simplicity and detail.

this book is very useful. It has lots of examples that demonstrated the how and why of the Commons components. The explanations of some of the more complex components is also quite good. Just using all the examples and seeeing what all is possible was worth the money as I expect that this information will save me and my team a lot of time and effort.

Jakarta Commons is a collection of generally unrelated but useful classes that can be incorporated into any Java project. In general, the documentation available is limited at best and in some cases is limited to little more than the Javadoc from the API. This lack of good documentation has helped to prevent the widespread acceptance of the Commons classes. This book will help to address that major shortcoming of the Jakarta Commons.

This book is an introduction to the most commonly used classes found in Jakarta Commons. Not all the components are covered. For example, Betwixt, Jelly, Jexl, and Codec are barely mentioned. However, the components that the author discusses are the most useful and are generally well covered. The book starts off slowly with an introduction to Jakarta Commons and then a brief and incomplete look at the Lang component. This chapter will give you no more than a flavor of what is available. The Logging component is well covered although I would probably never use it and the coverage of the Validator component should have concentrated solely on implementation outside of Struts and left Struts explanations to books on Struts. The remaining chapters cover the more useful components including Digester, Pooling, BeanUtils, and FileUpload and do a great job of explaining the components and providing realistic examples of usage.

Anyone who is writing Java code should be interested in the Jakarta Commons and anyone who is interested in Jakarta Commons should have a copy of this book. It will serve both as a good introduction to Commons components and a reference to using those components.

The lack Open Source books in some areas often is the main cause that programmers write the same code over and over.

I found the book to be a good introduction to the Jakarta commons libraries. While it is very dificult to cover the wide range of jakarta commons in just cca. 200 pages, the author made a selection of what he think it was the most important topics:

Lang, Logging, Validator, BeanUtils, pool, dbcp, Digester, collections, primitives, httpclient, fileupload, net, dbutils, codec, jxpath, discovery.

Some topics are covered in more deep than others. For example JXPath covered in just cca. 5 pages is not a worth. The "fast reviewed" topics are:

dbutils, codec, jxpath, discovery.

All in all, I think the book is an good introduction to of Jakarta commons libraries.

A worth buy to anyone trying to save time by reusing the excelent code written for one of the most recognized communities in the Open Source world: The Apache Software Foundation.

This book is a very good guide to the best of Jakarta Commons. The book has lots of useful examples that illustrate how the various components can be used for real world Java and J2EE development.

The book info on Amazon is insufficient. (...)

On reading this book, I see that I was almost reinventing the wheel every day on my project. Using lots of Jakarta Commons components and writing as little custom code as possible, is the way to go. These small Commons components pack quite a punch and the author does a good job of showing how one can quickly get up to speed with the components and minimize writing custom code.