Rating: 
Summary: Available Online
Review: A great book for leveraging the most out of your Netbans installation. Perhaps a bit too detailed for the average programmer. Just wanted to point out that the book is available online in pdf format[...]
Rating: 
Summary: It's a good book, but Eclipse is a better open-source IDE
Review: At first, I thought that this book was a good book. It covered a free open-source IDE for Java and I wanted to learn to program in Java. I met a professional Java who was going to the Sun One Conference in San Francisco and he recommended Eclipse. I tried Eclipse and I think that it's much better than NetBeans. I first started to dislike NetBeans when it used tilde characters in my pathnames, which made them unreadable. I tried Eclipse and so far I love it. I'm selling my NetBeans book.
Rating:
Summary: Enough! or Too much
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Paradigms, metaphors, nodes and objects
Review: I have always maintained that everything after getting "hello world" to run is merely hacking. I sat down with this book to get a jumpstart on using NetBeans. But the book starts out with "Concepts and Paradigms." It is filled with computer-sciencey, jargon-filled, stiff writing. Page 22 has the illuminating comment "Typical of this grouping together of disparate actions under a unifying metaphor is the concept that NetBeans Explorer nodes are pretty uniformly subject to some sort of "Customize" action." Look - I create projects, edit, compile, deploy and debug programs. I need to know how to do that in a concrete way (and quickly). The "paradigms" and "models" and "metaphors" and every last abstruse option can come later. No doubt that this is a complete and extensive view of NetBeans, but it shouldn't be confused with a "quick-start" tutorial. The book is definitely geared to the very experienced Java programmer who is comfortable with all the design pattern jargon. I found it highly frustrating as a getting started guide to an IDE.
Rating:
Summary: Paradigms, metaphors, nodes and objects
Review: I have always maintained that everything after getting "hello world" to run is merely hacking. I sat down with this book to get a jumpstart on using NetBeans. But the book starts out with "Concepts and Paradigms." It is filled with computer-sciencey, jargon-filled, stiff writing. Page 22 has the illuminating comment "Typical of this grouping together of disparate actions under a unifying metaphor is the concept that NetBeans Explorer nodes are pretty uniformly subject to some sort of "Customize" action." Look - I create projects, edit, compile, deploy and debug programs. I need to know how to do that in a concrete way (and quickly). The "paradigms" and "models" and "metaphors" and every last abstruse option can come later. No doubt that this is a complete and extensive view of NetBeans, but it shouldn't be confused with a "quick-start" tutorial. The book is definitely geared to the very experienced Java programmer who is comfortable with all the design pattern jargon. I found it highly frustrating as a getting started guide to an IDE.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding, in the best O'Reilly tradition
Review: I have been using Netbeans as an amateur Java programmer for a couple of years. Although having understood that Netbeans is more than a traditional IDE, I had never taken the time to find out what that was all about. But that is exactly what the authors of this book sets out to do. The first part is a walktrough of the IDE, and this part is superb in itself. But then comes the even better part - showing us that Netbeans is so much more - basically it is a fully extendible enviroment that can act as your foundation for more or less any application.
The text is dense and profound, yet it is clear and extremely well written, it seems that the principle of "deep simplicity" have been followed. There are relatively few figures and pictures, and the authors have avoided sprinkling trivial code examples around. Also, you can fire up Netbeans and follow the examples, so learning by doing as well as reading. Of the 10-20 Java related titles from O'Reilly that I own this one ranks in among top 3. I strongly recomend this book if you are interested in Netbeans.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, in the best O'Reilly tradition
Review: I have been using Netbeans as an amateur Java programmer for a couple of years. Although having understood that Netbeans is more than a traditional IDE, I had never taken the time to find out what that was all about. But that is exactly what the authors of this book sets out to do. The first part is a walktrough of the IDE, and this part is superb in itself. But then comes the even better part - showing us that Netbeans is so much more - basically it is a fully extendible enviroment that can act as your foundation for more or less any application.
The text is dense and profound, yet it is clear and extremely well written, it seems that the principle of "deep simplicity" have been followed. There are relatively few figures and pictures, and the authors have avoided sprinkling trivial code examples around. Also, you can fire up Netbeans and follow the examples, so learning by doing as well as reading. Of the 10-20 Java related titles from O'Reilly that I own this one ranks in among top 3. I strongly recomend this book if you are interested in Netbeans.
Rating:
Summary: Netbeans
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: clear explanations and examples
Review: NetBeans, a free IDE available ..., is based on donated code developed by Sun. The NetBeans architecture is an open architecture that supports plug-ins for each function of the IDE. This book, which discusses the NetBeans IDE, is made up of two parts. The first part is a description of the IDE designed for the NetBeans user. The NetBeans architecture is described in detail. The book covers each of the different pieces such as editing, compiling, and debugging. The book also covers using the NetBeans GUI editor to design visual components. Integrating NetBeans with CVS and Ant is also covered. The book does a fairly good job in this section of providing a handy manual for NetBeans users. The second part of the book is aimed at those who wish to use the NetBeans open architecture to define their own modules to be added to NetBeans. This part of the book is very well written and will serve as a major resource for anyone interested in module writing. Several examples are demonstrated including building an IMAP email server and client to integrate into NetBeans. The first part of the book is for a general audience and will be useful but it isn't required reading to use NetBeans. The second part of the book has a more limited audience but will be extremely useful to anyone interested in writing NetBeans modules. Overall this is a well-written book with clear explanations and examples.
Rating:
Summary: REAL DEFINITIVE GUIDE ON 'NETBEANS'
Review: NETBEANS: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE is a well-organized book, whose informative chapters gave a good account of NetBeans Integrated Development Environment. With additional information for developers whose experience on open source development projects is marginal, this book benefits programmers who employ Java in software creation. Its expertly divulged details include a ramified analysis of NetBeans IDE vis-a-vis Borland's JBuilder.
The provided samples and examples assist readers in practising what they have learnt. This is clearly a definitive guide on Netbeans.
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