Java Secrets (Secrets S.)

Rating:
Summary: Interesting book on the Java Language - lots of mistakes
Review: There sun classes are interesting, but outdated now. The book contains many typos and misprintings. This author seems to write books in a rapid succession and unfortunately includes a lot of mistakes. Mistake-riddled seems to be a common theme in most reviews of Rusty's books.

Rating:
Summary: Wait for the second edition.
Review: This book promises a lot, and often delivers.However, there are enough deficiencies thatthe prospective buyer should consider waiting for the second edition. The biggest problem with the book is that, like so many other Java titles, it was rushed out the door. This is most apparent in the book's figures, which range from perplexing to downright misleading, due to widespread errors and omissions. For example, the diagram of the byte layout for a little-endian machine is simply wrong. Various other diagrams which show the stack before and after various bytecode operations are half-finished -- literally. They have one or two parameters filled in, and the rest are blank. It's mind-boggling that the editors thought it wasn't important enough to get these simple things right and delay the book's release slightly. But that seems to be the current thinking behind many current Java books. Fortunately, Harold's text is generally correct, even when the figures aren't. So if you're willing to pointedly ignore the figures, you can get some good information from the book. My only other complaint is a more subjective one: While promising to reveal Java secrets, much of the book focuses on the Sun classes, which are not guaranteed to be portable at all -- Harold addresses all this well, but the bottom line is that well over 50% of the book is devoted to these non-portable classes. If this is what you're looking for, it's a great resource, but if you are not interested in the inner workings of the Sun packages, you may be somewhat disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Great for reference.
Review: This is not a book where you gonna learn how to write HalloWorld.java and that's GREAT!! This book allow you to learn some new things about java that you didn't know before, but not as much new stuff as the author promised you in the beginning of the book. If you have programmed java for a while and want to discover new tricks of java, this could be the book for you.