Charlie Calvert's Learn JBuilder

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful on-ramp to the world of JBuilder
Review: As a programmer with 15+ years of experience programming with Clipper, Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, C++ Builder and Delphi I was looking for a book that would get me up to speed on Java using JBuilder as quickly as possible. In Charlie Calvert's 'Learn JBuilder' I found what I was looking for and a lot more!

This is a well crafted book that not only teaches you everything you need to get going with JBuilder, but reinforces excellent object oriented programming techniques and programming standards as well. I can't say enough about how well written I think this book is and how helpful it has been to me. I have read more than 50 computer programming books and I think this is the best written one of them all. Sometimes I need a spark to get me going on a new technology and this book has re-energized my desire to learn.

I only hope that Charlie and Margie decide to write a similar book on C#Builder.

Niels Damgaard - IT Manager, Delco Automation Inc.

Rating:
Summary: Good: But too quickly out of date
Review: I must preface my comments by stating I'm an experienced programmer who is trying get into Java and JBuilder and hence reading a book at this level: "Learn JBuilder".

The book is mostly well written and under normal circumtances it would rate highly. But Java and JBuilder are moving so fast that a book published in 2003 is already "out of date" by June in the same year!

The authors use examples from JBuilder 7 and I'm using JBuilder 8. There are so many differences between the versions that some confusions are enough to make the learning process more difficult than necessary.

My dissatisfaction is not about the authors' efforts than about the nature of the industry where the ethos is about making everyone run "on the spot", making "improvements" to software which are not really esssential and forcing everyone to upgrade and learn new things which are not really necessary.

The whole approach is inefficient and counter-productive. It should not be tolerated by any clear thinking programmer. I am tempted to recommend everyone to abandon this "circus".

Rating:
Summary: Good: But too quickly out of date
Review: I must preface my comments by stating I'm an experienced programmer who is trying get into Java and JBuilder and hence reading a book at this level: "Learn JBuilder".

The book is mostly well written and under normal circumtances it would rate highly. But Java and JBuilder are moving so fast that a book published in 2003 is already "out of date" by June in the same year!

The authors use examples from JBuilder 7 and I'm using JBuilder 8. There are so many differences between the versions that some confusions are enough to make the learning process more difficult than necessary.

My dissatisfaction is not about the authors' efforts than about the nature of the industry where the ethos is about making everyone run "on the spot", making "improvements" to software which are not really esssential and forcing everyone to upgrade and learn new things which are not really necessary.

The whole approach is inefficient and counter-productive. It should not be tolerated by any clear thinking programmer. I am tempted to recommend everyone to abandon this "circus".

Rating:
Summary: Very well written, a pleasure to learn from
Review: This is a Jbuilder book for beginning Java programmers, but not the kind that has a keyboard diagram to show you where the Escape key is and what a double click means. This book is full of useful information and valuable tips. What neither Amazon nor Wordware (the publisher) say is that is oriented to the Personal and SE editions of Jbuilder. The capabilities of Enterprise are not covered. On page 16 of the book this is made clear. On the other side, I had not seen a product oriented book so well written in a long time. Most of them were transcripts of the help files with some notes added but not this one. The material in the CD complements what did not fit on paper. I learned as much from it as from reading the book.Recommended!