Rating: 
Summary: Save your money
Review: I got this book in the hopes of getting some more detailed information on java i/o than you can get from more broadly scoped books. Unfortunately, I found hardly anything in this book that is not discussed more clearly and concisely in the Java API docs. Six pages on reading and writing Integers? Fascinating! Save your money, get the API docs and search the discussion forums.
Rating: 
Summary: I finally understand Java I/O
Review: I had been using Java without really comprehending Java's approach to I/O. Other books never really explained what was going on to the extent that I could ever trust myself to write I/O code without having a book open.This book clearly explains the theory and practice of Java I/O, and all the various features. It's the second most valuable Java book I own (Java in a Nutshell being the most frequently used). The book has led me to trying out facilities (such as compression and number formatting) that I otherwise shunned because of poor descriptions.
Rating:
Summary: Shame O'Reilly, shame!
Review: I picked up this book to cover multilingual charset issues, which are missing in all the standard Java resources but neatly listed in this title's contents/index. Great, I thought, something for those of us who speak English but sell software to the other 93% of the world.
After I had laid my [money] down at the bookstore, I found out the sordid truth- the author is a newbie in regards to the multilingual issues but didn't let it stop him from writing down some shockers. To be nice, he probably got a little enthusiastic about Java's genuinely wide multilingual capabilities and tried to promote it, but some parts of this book are anti-education, end of story...
Rating:
Summary: Excellent treatment of an area usually taken for granted
Review: I'm a C++ programmer that has given himself a crash-course in Java for a project at work. If I had this book earlier, I would have gotten things done a lot faster. Every programmer should be familiar with input and output streams, but how many can say they know the in's and out's of Java's cryptographic streams and piped streams? If asked, could you tell the difference between a BufferedWriter and a PrintWriter? I had to use three books to accumulate the knowledge I could have gained by just reading this one book. If you are a beginning or intermediate Java programmer, don't assume you know everything about Java I/O and what it can do; check out the pearls of wisdom in this book. Needless to say, now I'm writing much better I/O-related Java code because of it, and I believe you will too.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for serious Java programmers
Review: I've read many different Java books but most of them covered just the basics of Java I/O. I really got this book because I was interested in working with packet protocols in Java. The book covers many topics very clearily and I recommend it very highly. I enjoyed this book so much, I purchased Harold's other book "Java Network Programming".
Rating: 
Summary: The Best Book I've Ever Written
Review: Java's input and output facilities have been unfairly maligned for some time. It is widely (but incorrectly) believed that I/O in Java is a lot weaker and a lot harder than I/O in traditional languages like C, C++, and Pascal. If anything, however, the exact opposite is true. Java's I/O tools are far more sophisticated, more powerful, and easier to use than traditional printf()/scanf() style I/O. I/O in C, C++, and most other languages, is hamstrung by the assumption that what's being read or written is a 1970s era dumb terminal, or at least something very much like it. Java is the first major language to throw out this assumption. Java recognizes that programs that read and write files, network connections, and serial port devices are a lot more important than toy programs that read numbers from the command line. Consequently Java focuses on solving professional programmers' real problems, instead of CS101 textbook examples. Rather than copying old-fashioned APIs based on dumb ASCII terminals from the 1970s or DOS prompts from the 1980s, Java's designers created a new I/O API based on streams that better suits the international network programs of the 1990s and beyond. Unfortunately, precisely because Java I/O is structured so differently from I/O in the languages most of us grew up with, many programmers don't realize how simple and powerful it really is. I first noticed this after I wrote Java Network Programming. Many of the questions I got from readers weren't about network programming at all. They were about I/O. That's when I began thinking seriously about writing a prequel to Java Network Programming; a book that would cover the java.io package and show programmers how to really take advantage of Java's I/O facilities to write very powerful programs far more quickly than they could in any other language. Java I/O is that book. What a long strange trip this book has been. When I started to write it back in 1997, I thought it would take about two months and 200 pages. In fact it took over year and a half and 600 pages, but in that year and a half I did manage to do my best work ever. A lot of the credit for that belongs to O'Reilly & Associates for letting me and other authors do good work instead of just cranking out day and date books as quickly as possible. A fine computer book, like a fine wine, requires time. It's simply not possible to write a 300 to 1200 page tome in three months and expect that it will be reasonably complete and error free. At best you can hope that the mistakes aren't too obvious or too annoying. And yet, a normal schedule for most computer books specifies that the first draft will be written in somewhere between two and four months. On that tight a schedule, there simply isn't time to get everything right. Most of the time authors simply write as fast as they possibly can with little error checking or review. If an author isn't certain about something, they have to make their best guess, write a sentence or paragraph, and move on. If an author really doesn't understand something they're supposed to write about, they'll often drop it out of the book completely rather than take the time to research it. Authors don't like to do this, but we often have no other choice. When I was writing Java I/O, I had the time to carefully think about each sentence I wrote. If I wasn't sure about something, I could go to the library and research it. I could send email to the author of a specification or API, and ask them what they meant. And I could actually wait till they wrote me back, before I went on with the chapter. It was not uncommon to spend an entire day doing background research just to make sure one sentence was exactly correct. If I wasn't sure if a method behaved exactly like I said it did, or if there was even the slightest bit of doubt in my head, I could spend an afternoon writing test code. Before I wrote Chapter 10, Cryptographic Streams, I took a week to do nothing but read Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography to make sure the fundamentals were clear in my head. I did similar amounts of preliminary research for Chapter 9, Compressing Streams, and Chapter 17, The Java Communications API. And then I took probably a month apiece to write each of those three chapters, after the background research was complete. At any other publisher, those three chapters alone would have exhausted my deadline. When you write an O'Reilly book, you get the time to do it right. The result of all this effort and time is the best book I've ever written. I do hope you'll give it a try.
Rating:
Summary: Best programming book I've read
Review: The basis of Java is to make hard things easy and easy things impossible. And among one of these impossibilites is standard I/O. After having tried almost every single I/O class in Java and having been only able to get FileReader and FileWriter to work successfully, I decided to buy this book. I was afraid that I would get it and it would be so technical that only people who wear pocket protectors as their standard gear would be able to read it, but this was not a problem. Mr. Harrold was perfectly willing to lay everything out just as clearly as was physically possible, while at the same time still giving an equal amount of importance to examples. Other reviewers seem to have viewed this as a weakness in the book, but personally, I would say that having an extra 50% percent of stuff you will never need is better than only having half of what is necessary to accomplish anything. Due to my having bought this book, in the last month I have gone from basic file reading and writing, building my own file reader with a readLine() method of my own make since Sun's is buggy, to internet connections to having most recently written a proxy that logs all events that go on in my internet browser by concurrently handling six I/O operations(an in from the internet to two outs to my browser and log file, and an in from my browser to the two outs of the internet and my log file.) And I say this not to boast my prowess, but to show you just how valuable this book is to anyone who will be doing any Java programming that involves I/O.
Rating:
Summary: Best programming book I've read
Review: The basis of Java is to make hard things easy and easy things impossible. And among one of these impossibilites is standard I/O. After having tried almost every single I/O class in Java and having been only able to get FileReader and FileWriter to work successfully, I decided to buy this book. I was afraid that I would get it and it would be so technical that only people who wear pocket protectors as their standard gear would be able to read it, but this was not a problem. Mr. Harrold was perfectly willing to lay everything out just as clearly as was physically possible, while at the same time still giving an equal amount of importance to examples. Other reviewers seem to have viewed this as a weakness in the book, but personally, I would say that having an extra 50% percent of stuff you will never need is better than only having half of what is necessary to accomplish anything. Due to my having bought this book, in the last month I have gone from basic file reading and writing, building my own file reader with a readLine() method of my own make since Sun's is buggy, to internet connections to having most recently written a proxy that logs all events that go on in my internet browser by concurrently handling six I/O operations(an in from the internet to two outs to my browser and log file, and an in from my browser to the two outs of the internet and my log file.) And I say this not to boast my prowess, but to show you just how valuable this book is to anyone who will be doing any Java programming that involves I/O.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, with useful examples, but needs some corrections
Review: The book is good, complete and shows you the details of I/O for Java (you should be at least an intermediate programmer); however, there are some errata that you must check in the web page of O'Reilly. You can download the code of examples from the web page, and this code is corrected (it compiles and run), but some examples in the book are not: If you write down the code directly from the book you'll realize the problems. I bought it in in mid 2001, but the corrections were not yet included in the edition I got, so supose you'll have to include them. Nevertheless, after doing it, you'll have a good book to study and use the I/O capabilities of Java.
Rating: 
Summary: First unsatisfactory Oreilly book
Review: This book covers everything about the Java I/O library however the examples are so bad.... The author used a generic class for all the samples!! This is a good example of reusability however it doesn't help people who want to learn or copy those examples..... Frankly I don't recommend this book. If you're looking for good examples check out "Java Examples in a Nutshell" from the same editor....
| 
