Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enough! or Too much, May 14, 2003
I agree with the other reviewers: this is an outstanding book and a must-have for anyone who is serious about programming in Java using the NetBeans IDE. However, it is not a book that will teach you the Java programming language, nor is it a book that will in any way extend your Java programming abilities into such areas as Java Beans, Servlets, or JSPs. The first ten chapters are really the core how-to. These cover 1) Installation, 2) Basic Concepts, 3) The Source Editor, 4) Debugging, 5) Compiling, 6) Customizing the IDE, 7) Using CVS, 8) GUI Building, 9) JavaBeans, 10) JavaDoc. Beyond that, there are two other chapters devoted to working with XML, JSPs, and Servlets. These chapters are meant to show programmers already comfortable with these technologies how to utilize NetBeans for implementing them; they are NOT for learning the technologies themselves. The rest of the book is quite advanced, and I'll admit that as an intermediate-level programmer I haven't been able to benefit from it. It consists of detailed analyses of how to create custom NetBeans modules, how to tune the existing modules for performance, etc. For those of us who are still grappling with the enormous amount of study necessary in order to build a functional Java program, this book represents a good investment. But you will probably only use the first 200 pages, about 1/3 of the total book. So you must ask yourself, "Does the cost of this book justify the 200 pages I will probably only ever use?" The answer to that question is Yes, if you are truly serious about programming in Java. This NetBeans IDE is truly awesome, and it is a godsend for those of us who have struggled to code in Notepad or something equally as [bad]. For those of us who are not really serious but merely casual programmers, I would say, No -- there are much better ways to invest your time and money.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Netbeans, September 28, 2003
By A Customer
Netbeans is a free full-featured IDE for Java. The original code was developed by Sun and donated to the Netbeans open source community. This book will not teach any Java programming, but will teach you how to use Netbeans to program in Java. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is about using the IDE to write Java code for your application. The second part is about writing modules to plug into Netbeans to extend its functionality. The opening chapters cover features available to most IDEs, including debugging and using the GUI building functionality of Netbeans. The chapter on CVS was helpful in setting a CVS client with Netbeans, but it only gives a high-level overview of CVS, not enough to learn CVS with this book alone. The GUI building chapter is a very good tutorial on how to build GUI forms inside of Netbeans. The sections on the code generation properties and adding event handlers are well written and easy to follow and should be easy to incorporate into your own projects. The second part of the book covers consists of how to create custom modules using the Netbeans API. The examples are well written and comprehensive. If a programmer were going to write a custom module, these chapters would be very helpful, but most users of Netbeans are not going to write custom modules, so he or she could skip the last part of the book. This book is really two books in one, one is about using Netbeans and the other is about extending Netbeans using the Netbeans API. The book has excellent examples and is a good tutorial, but the second part is probably excessive for most users.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beware: Sample Source Code Obsolete, November 16, 2005
Overall, this book is a very good reference but there are currently only two books written dedicated to the use of the NetBeans IDE and platform.
I am currently working with the 5.0 Beta release of NetBeans and it has some very nice new features and excellent forums and tutorials at netbeans.org. However, having progressed through the O'Reilly book tutorials one thing is very clear - the API's are continually changing.
The majority of code samples in this book cannot be compiled and run in the current and beta releases of NetBeans. This makes this book less useful than need be. It would be wise of O'Reilly to make an effort to release an second edition or at least to provide updates to the sample code which overcome the deprecation of classes used in the examples.
Perhaps even NetBeans.org could update and post retooled examples as the ones presented appear to be very useful indeed.
Bottom Line: Very disappointed with examples being outdated and unusable.
Otherwise, the book is informative and well written as I have found all of my references from O'Reilly.
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