Rating: 
Summary: Solid information, compactly presented
Review: This book contains a set of "recipes" for common, important, non-trivial uses of a bunch of (free!) Java tools. The recipies are combinations of "how to" information and best practice recommendations.The thing that sticks out most in my mind about the book is that while I already had most of the knowledge contained in it (I've used most of the tools in J2EE projects in the past), that knowledge took a lot of time to figure out along the way. This book like this could have saved me substantial time in setting up a project using these tools. Extreme Programming appears in the title, but you don't need to be using that methodology to benefit from the contents; nearly all of it is applicable to any project following good software development practices. I recommend this book very much to anyone wanting to add these tools (Ant, JUnit, Cactus, XDoclet, etc.) to their project.
Rating:
Summary: Solid information, compactly presented
Review: This book contains a set of "recipes" for common, important, non-trivial uses of a bunch of (free!) Java tools. The recipies are combinations of "how to" information and best practice recommendations. The thing that sticks out most in my mind about the book is that while I already had most of the knowledge contained in it (I've used most of the tools in J2EE projects in the past), that knowledge took a lot of time to figure out along the way. This book like this could have saved me substantial time in setting up a project using these tools. Extreme Programming appears in the title, but you don't need to be using that methodology to benefit from the contents; nearly all of it is applicable to any project following good software development practices. I recommend this book very much to anyone wanting to add these tools (Ant, JUnit, Cactus, XDoclet, etc.) to their project.
Rating:
Summary: Great book if you remember to use it
Review: This book covers a very similar selection of tools and techniques to "Java Tools for Extreme Programming" by Hightower and Lesiecki, and in a broadly similar way. Both use the currently fashionable idea of Extreme Programming (XP) to attract readers to a collection of short pieces about a bunch of useful tools for Java programming. The XP stuff is covered quickly at the start, the meat of the book is in the "recipes", which walk you through configuring and using tools such as Ant, JUnit, Cactus etc. to build, unit-test and manage the development of a Java project. The tools and tips the authors have chosen to include are a good representation of current practice, but I have a few reservations about the organization and structure of the book. My biggest worry is whether the target reader is actually likely to find many solutions. The authors seem to assume that everyone will pore over the several pages of "contents" at the front of the book every time they hit an obstacle, but in my experience they are just as likely to flip through pages or head for the index at the back, neither of which works particularly well. Worse than that, they may never think to look in the book in the first place - the "Extreme Programming" in the title may help it sell, but it's not something that jumps to mind when you are struggling to get Ant to deploy a web application to Tomcat. That said, I'm glad I've got it, and some of the recipes now have little sticky notes to try and remind me that it's often an unexpectedly good place to look for Java development tips.
Rating:
Summary: Great book if you remember to use it
Review: This book covers a very similar selection of tools and techniques to "Java Tools for Extreme Programming" by Hightower and Lesiecki, and in a broadly similar way. Both use the currently fashionable idea of Extreme Programming (XP) to attract readers to a collection of short pieces about a bunch of useful tools for Java programming. The XP stuff is covered quickly at the start, the meat of the book is in the "recipes", which walk you through configuring and using tools such as Ant, JUnit, Cactus etc. to build, unit-test and manage the development of a Java project. The tools and tips the authors have chosen to include are a good representation of current practice, but I have a few reservations about the organization and structure of the book. My biggest worry is whether the target reader is actually likely to find many solutions. The authors seem to assume that everyone will pore over the several pages of "contents" at the front of the book every time they hit an obstacle, but in my experience they are just as likely to flip through pages or head for the index at the back, neither of which works particularly well. Worse than that, they may never think to look in the book in the first place - the "Extreme Programming" in the title may help it sell, but it's not something that jumps to mind when you are struggling to get Ant to deploy a web application to Tomcat. That said, I'm glad I've got it, and some of the recipes now have little sticky notes to try and remind me that it's often an unexpectedly good place to look for Java development tips.
Rating:
Summary: Great book if you remember to use it
Review: This book covers a very similar selection of tools and techniques to "Java Tools for Extreme Programming" by Hightower and Lesiecki, and in a broadly similar way. Both use the currently fashionable idea of Extreme Programming (XP) to attract readers to a collection of short pieces about a bunch of useful tools for Java programming. The XP stuff is covered quickly at the start, the meat of the book is in the "recipes", which walk you through configuring and using tools such as Ant, JUnit, Cactus etc. to build, unit-test and manage the development of a Java project. The tools and tips the authors have chosen to include are a good representation of current practice, but I have a few reservations about the organization and structure of the book. My biggest worry is whether the target reader is actually likely to find many solutions. The authors seem to assume that everyone will pore over the several pages of "contents" at the front of the book every time they hit an obstacle, but in my experience they are just as likely to flip through pages or head for the index at the back, neither of which works particularly well. Worse than that, they may never think to look in the book in the first place - the "Extreme Programming" in the title may help it sell, but it's not something that jumps to mind when you are struggling to get Ant to deploy a web application to Tomcat. That said, I'm glad I've got it, and some of the recipes now have little sticky notes to try and remind me that it's often an unexpectedly good place to look for Java development tips.
Rating:
Summary: Great technology how-to, but not a cookbook
Review: This is an interesting work because while it does have the cookbook format it isn't really a cookbook. The book starts with an introduction to the XP methodology (which is concise and great), and then has chapters on a number of tools (Ant, JUnit, HTTPUnit, XDoclet, Tomcat, etc.). Each of these technology chapters has a number of 'recipes' which are in fact how-to segments about commonly used tasks around these technologies. Now these sections are great and I think anyone looking at these technologies should consider this book a quick and concise way to learn the fundamentals. That being said the book fails somewhat, and thus the four stars, because it isn't organized in the problem/solution manner of the cookbooks. Most of the chapters are about testing but these are organized around the tool and not the problem. I would have preferred a section on web development that combined information on Tomcat and Ant, and one on web testing that talked about HTTPUnit, JUnit and Ant. In that way the book addresses problem areas without relying on the reader to understand the tool that would address his problem in addition to understanding his problem at hand. My gripe is not so critical. The content in the book still remains very valuable and if you are looking for a concise how-to in these Java technologies you should have a look at this book.
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