Java Internationalization

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Great book on I18N, but I believe some more detail could have been given on the gotchas of using Unicode. I still think it is worthy of 4 stars however.

Rating:
Summary: Thorough and comprehensive
Review: It's true that Deitsch's book offers little more subject matter than Sun's excellent Internationalization chapter of the Java tutorial at their web site. But it has the virues of being a book, which you can curl up with, thumb around in, and mark up. And it covers the Sun topics in more depth, with a wealth of examples.

Java is the programming language that built in language support from the ground up, and *Java Internationalization* tells you how to take advantage of this feature. If you are writing Java code for international markets, this is your one-stop shop for a complete textbook on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent explanation of Unicode, multi-lingual challenges
Review: The authors do a very good job of clearly describing the challenges of writing a multi-lingual capable applications. They do so for both client-based and web-based applications. I learned more than I thought I would about non-English languages and how vastly they can differ from our own. The real find is in their coverage of Unicode, explaining what it hopes to achieve and how it impacts your Java programming.

I would say the next revision (if there's going to be one) would benefit by expanding font installation in other operating systems. Not too surprisingly, they cover only Windows, as it has the best unicode support today. However, TrueType support is possible on the Unixes, if you know how. I'd be curious to know how it would be possible on Mac OS X. The book would also benefit from expanded discussion on internationalizing web applications. It only covers display issues. The authors cite not wanting to cover issues surrounding web-based data entry and database operations because other authors discuss them, but those are relevant topics, IMO. After all, they discussed Swing-based data entry, so why not web forms? I was hoping for more complete coverage, as I am working on a I18N project now. But I'll have to hunt around for other books for the topics I could not read about here.

Overall, this book is a great buy. Modern software developers would be foolish to not familiarize themselves with the I18N APIs in today's global economy.

Rating:
Summary: Good overview, but wished for more depth
Review: This book does a good job of handling localization issues with respect to java applications through the use of resource bundles, and native language UIs.

In my current project we are doing some very intensive XML processing with web content. Web content can be in any number of encodings and character sets, and we've had a decent number of problems when converting content from one encoding to another or from one character set to another.

I was hoping that this book would give very practical hints about how to handle/avoid/rectify character set conversion issues in java. However, the only mention of converting encodings/character sets claims that if you use the proper java.io class with the proper constructor arguments, java will wave it's magic wand and all is right with the world. I can tell you for a fact this isn't true. This was a big disappointment of this book.

Rating:
Summary: A good overview of internationalization
Review: This book is a good review of internationalization in Java. It covers the basic topics like time & date format, string separation, property files, resource bundles, languages methods, etc.

My only complaint about the book is it really doesn't have any information that isn't already available on Sun's web site, and it seems that the most critical concepts have little or no examples while on the other hand, it gives detailed time & date format information for every language in the world; even Esperanto.

I wish the book had focused more on code and examples, and less on the locale specific details.