Customer Reviews

Programming for Linguists: Java Technology for Language Researchers

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This book is indeed for beginners - it's Java programming for linguists, not linguistics for Java programmers! It is an introduction to Java programming for people who are mainly interested in corpus linguistics and text processing rather than, say, web applets or business programming. And I think it does a decent job. So does the companion volume for Perl. I only wish there were a Python edition in the series.

As the title of the book says, "Programming for Linguistis". The author assumes that most linguists don't have any programming experience and may not have to write a complicate program, the content is therefore very simple. However, it is just somehow too simple. Sometimes we still have to use a complex function in a easy program, whose explanation is skipped. For example, the author never explains why "-1" in "line.indexOF(word) > -1" means a word in anywhere in a line . Examples like this make people confused and cause more and more problems as learners go deeper and deeper. I believe as a linguist, we may only have write a small program sometimes, but we don't have to be an expert of Java doesn't mean that we don't have to understand it clearly. I still suggest that if you are a linguist and want to learn Java, you have to choose other Java books which is written in a clear way and then find useful examples for linguists such as searching in a text in this book.

I think this book is intended for people with no programming experience at all. As such it was not very useful to me. Being interested in linguistics and programming for linguist I had a hard time finding real information in this book. I strongly advise not to buy this book.
Being a non-native English speaker I apologise for the errors in my writing.