Rating: 
Summary: Emperor has no cloth!
Review: If you actually spend time READ this book (instead of read
the reviews of it) you will find it is full of error! none of
the source code is complete. CD comes with the book is full of
useless junks. I would challenge the authors to answer the following question: in chap. 5, how can class Timer work?!
it has a instance variable 'myITime' which is never initialized but on p228, it is called: 'this.myITime.wakeup()'...
Rating: 
Summary: Good in Combination with other subjects
Review: This book has a place in introducing KISS (Keep it simple stupid) OOD rules of thumb. It does a good job of presenting a formulaic and repeatable approach to avoiding serious design pitfalls, but does only a mediocre job of explaining what the real impact of what it terms "poor design" decisions to be (i.e. impact to flexibility, maintainability, extensibility, etc). If you're involved with distributed programming and are looking to develop your architecture and design skills as expressed in UML modeling and Java implementation, read this book as a companion to "The Art of Objects", "UML Components" and "Refactoring".
Rating: 
Summary: Don't miss the point!
Review: Ok, there seems to be some serious inconsistensies between one reviewer and the next. Some say this book is one-star trash, others say it's a five star gem. Weird, eh? I needed some serious design guidance at my first real work (not in school-class anymore with a teacher nearby). At first I decided not to buy this book because of some of the bad reviews. I bought couple of other books and got nowhere. Now I read this book too and wham was I surprised! This book is excellent. I find it very obvious now that the persons who gave this book bad reviews were either not good/experienced programmers at all, thus they didn't notice the actual points the authors were trying to convey at times, or the readers just plain read this book too fast with too little thought. It is easy to read this book without actually thinking, because the book does not look very dry or academic. It lacks the "aura of seriousness" just like the author's other book on Color UML, which some people mistakenly dismiss as somewhat of a childrens' book. This book is NOT about inheritance. It is NOT about interfaces. It is NOT about notification. Nor about threads. Many people thought it was and, of course they already knew those aspects from any basic Java book. This book is about DESIGNING a program using those features. Every chapter cuts the aspects you have to consider about the topic, into a handful of clear guidelines. Every chapter summarizes listing those guidelines at the end of the chapter. If you make the mistake of just reading through, "Aha, yeah, of course... nice, seems smart..." you don't really learn to use them. When you have read this book, go back to design your software. Now, at every step go through all the chapter summaries an APPLY all the guidelines to every design step you make. Then you'll slowly begin to learn. It will feel as if a lightbulb was lit inside your head. "Oh, THIS is how it's done!" After some experience, you only need this book occasionally, after making the guideline design steps into routine habits. Your code will reflect this by being clear and very professional quality. Also, someone complained that only some of the UML notation was used. This is again NOT a book on UML. It is a book on the design process/steps that Coad & Co feel are important. Nobody uses every aspect of UML. It is just too huge a notation language. You need to learn a subset that fits YOUR purposes. Some prefer the "Use Case Driven" approach, some "Feature Driven", and so on.
Rating:
Summary: It was okay, but is not the last word on the subject
Review: I read this book cover to cover. In my opinion a lot of the examples were rather contrived and not as related to the real world of professional programming and design as I would have preferred. The examples, I felt, had a lot of boring get/set methods but didn't teach anything about the java class hierarchy. I don't feel myself to be a better programmer or designer for having read this book. I think a better book is "Java Design Pattersn: a Tutorial" by James W. Cooper. Cooper's book has examples that in the process of teaching the "Gang of Four" design patterns uses simple swing examples that help to refresh the reader's memory of how to code simple Java GUI applications.
Rating: 
Summary: Some important ideas - very poorly presented
Review: There are some very important ideas communicated in this book. But it is not well written at all. The authors repeat themselves incessantly. There are also many errors. I am surprised to see that this is a second edition. I recommend that you wait for the third edition. The authors even voice opposition to some wonderful design methodologies that were invented elsewhere. No reason is given for their wariness of building objects that act like functions. Go to a bookstore, read the table of contents and Appendix A. That is really all they have to say. It's good stuff, though.
Rating: 
Summary: I liked the book; I find Mr Bose's aspersions groundless
Review: 1 I liked the book; it makes about 4 major points, each with 4-8 subpoints; that's about all my brain will hold at a given time. I've been designing objects for about 12 years, and so am no neophyte in the area. Regardless of how many 1000-page books on the language one reads, it is the ability to organize chunks of the language into good designs that is key. 2 The merit of the book is entirely unrelated to its page count 3 The claim made in another review, that people rating this book high are only reviewing other Prentice-Hall books, and hence likely are Prentice-Hall employees, is false on its face; they review 'Legends of the Fall' and O'Reilly books. A sniping and unjustified attack.
Rating:
Summary: Not good
Review: Bought this book thinking it will teach me as much possible about UML and using Java in the examples just made it more attractive. But I was disappointed when the authors only used two types of UML diagrams in this book(class and sequence diagrams). Where are the other diagrams? Markedly missing is the Use Case diagram, the authors just jump from initial specification to class digrams, totally ignoring the use cases. This style is followed throughout the book. The diagram sketches is another downpoint of the book, it doesn't matter if they were drawn by professional artists, they still look unattractive. To wrap it up, I wont recommend this as a good buy.
Rating:
Summary: Not a good book
Review: After buying this 360 page for 36 bucks, I feel myself to be cheated. The book contains precious little. Very little design concepts. The CD contains almost nothing useful. The author has not found time to computerize the various figures in the book. It is the first computer book in which I saw such hand-drawn figures. This is a half-hearted approach. Moreover the author tries to fill up space by giving extra large fonts, large margins, and large spacings. Even then, the book is only 360 pages along with the large index at the back. The book contains some design concepts, but it is not worth the price. Overall a disappoint from such an high profile author. ANOTHER WARNING TO PROSPECTIVE BUYERS: Observe in detail about the posts of persons gving 5 stars. You will have no doubt that they are from Prentice Hall itself. Click on the link 'see more about me' beside the 5 star reviewers. You will find that they are giving 5 stars only to Prentice Hall books. Morever carefully study their languages. Most of them use same type of language, for eg. many of them use the phrase 'it has opened my eyes' . No doubt they are from a single Prentice Hall staff. Really disgusting behaviour from such a large reputable publishing house. I believe such activities are not ordered directly by top authorities but the work of over enthusiastic staffs. Management at Prentice Hall must stop this practice of their employees as this destroys the whole purpose of this review board.
Rating:
Summary: Good Design Book
Review: This book is about design, and is targeted towards readers who have some familiarity with design patterns but need more experience and want to see how to apply these tools using Java. Regarding the negative reviews, I think the problem is that people with insufficient background are missing the point of the book. The publisher is partly to blame by placing buzzwords like enterprise beans and swing packages on the cover, whereas these are only tangentially touched upon in the text. The readers who said they're decent Java hackers (that already suggests a person that won't understand design concepts), and people who thought the books spent too much time explaining inheritance and interfaces, just missed the point. The book wasn't explaining these concepts, but rather how to design using these concepts. The authors are guilty of assuming some OOD background from their readers. This book is not for beginners, though some beginners will get a lot out of it.
Rating:
Summary: If you want to learn to leverage Java in your design....
Review: this is is the book for you. If you are looking for a tutorial on Swing or UML, look elsewhere. If you want to learn to apply good design principles to a medium to large scale Java based project this is the book for you. The section on interfaces is worth the price alone. BTW a Sun Java Certification has no bearing on or relevance to the material in this book. This is a book about software architecture, not whether you know the difference between a wikkiTikkiListener and your navel. A moderate mastery of the English languange is also helpful to the reader's appreciation of this book.
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