Rating: 
Summary: Once again, the author has made some terrible choices
Review: This book covers Java I/O in a relatively competent fashion.However, the author, Mr. Harold, chose to use his very popular website on the day of terror--September 11, 2001--to condemn America for her foreign policy and to label the many analysts calling for reprisals "white war mongers". The implication--inescapable to me--was that we had it coming. In the several days following, he continued in the vein, never even bothering with a single sentence condemning the terrorists. This bothered me a great deal. If it bothers you, I suggest you look at other books covering Java IO (Core Java 2 or Sun's Java Library books that cover IO come to mind).
Rating:
Summary: I'd pass on this one.
Review: This book does a fair job of covering the topic. I found it semi-useful. I would not recommend it however. Other books give you more value for the money. I would recommend the Java Tutorial series or; Just Java 2 by Peter Van der Linden, those are great learning books. They give you real value for your money. They do a great job of helping you learn what you need to, to get your programming assignments done at work. The Sun Java website has also been very helpful to me. There, you can find anything you need to without wasting 50 bucks for a book that does not help you that much.
Rating: 
Summary: Fast track to learning I/O.
Review: This book is well written and informative. My favorite books are those that are written in such a fashion that the words flow from the page straight to my mind, do not past go, do not collect $200. This is such a book. There are a few typos, but the author mentions that corrections are available on his web site. Some reviewers failed to read the introduction to know this. If you're an experienced OO programmer of a different programming language currently building your Java knowledge foundation, get this book!
Rating:
Summary: Fast track to learning I/O.
Review: This book is well written and informative. My favorite books are those that are written in such a fashion that the words flow from the page straight to my mind, do not past go, do not collect $200. This is such a book. There are a few typos, but the author mentions that corrections are available on his web site. Some reviewers failed to read the introduction to know this. If you're an experienced OO programmer of a different programming language currently building your Java knowledge foundation, get this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Well-written, comprehensive treatment of the subject
Review: This is an excellent book. After jumping around and reading about a third of it, I was already recommending to some of the newer Java programmers around me to pick it up and get a solid understanding of proper I/O use in Java. I very much recommend this as any Java programmer's second book. Right after learning the language itself, this book should be read followed closely by other O'Reilly titles such as Java Threads and Java Network Programming. Those three books will give an in-depth understanding of the core Java API's for any new Java programmer, and will be of use to you no matter how you are using Java. Even after three years as a Java developer, I have learned from this book. The author often presents algorithms in clear steps and follows those clear steps with a correct implementation. Because of this clear presentation, the chapter on compression left me for the first time with an understanding of not only how to use the java.util.zip.* classes but how they work. What I learned there in one reading is immediately applicable to what I am working on now. The sections on Files is full of tips on how to use them in a cross platform fashion. Every new Java programmer needs to read that chapter before their applications actually get used. I was also impressed that several I/O classes missing in the standard library which I have only recently developed myself were presented as well. The StreamCopier and the TeeOutputStream are extremely useful classes that should be incorporated in some fashion into the base API. I wish I had them a long time ago. (A hint: you can also use the TeeOutputStream as a 'Traitor' to peek at your I/O while your program is running and without affecting its execution.) If I have any complaint about this book, it is that there are not more of these types of utilities presented for use by the advanced Java programmer. However, I haven't finished the book yet, so they may still be hidden there.
Rating: 
Summary: Long Winded
Review: This is an informative book and starts out well. It tells you more than you could possibly want to know about IO but as the days ween into weeks, you find yourself wondering, "Couldn't we just get to the point of it all?" The "book" project tends to get a little cumbersome after about chapter 7. Who really needs a file viewing program that badly? But it is possible to skip those portions and still get the important stuff. It's very detailed and the examples seem to be short and well written, except for that d--n File Viewer! At any rate, if you buy it, you won't buy another because you'll be sick of Streams!
Rating:
Summary: Pass On This One
Review: You'd probably do better following the tutorials on the Sun site.
| 
