Java 2 v5.0 (Tiger) New Features

Rating:
Summary: You can't go wrong with this book
Review: "If you already know Java and want to utilize the impressive array of innovations contained in Java 2, v5.0, this book is for you." That's actually from the back cover of the book and I have to say I fully agree. Schildt has brought us many useful titles and "Java 2, v5.0 (Tiger) New Features" is no exception.

The delightfully small book (a hair below 200 pages) packs just enough information to upgrade your know-how to the level of the latest Java version. Each topic (generics, autoboxing, enums, for-each, static imports, varargs, annotations, formatter, scanner) is explained clearly and concisely with expressive code samples. Schildt even lets you in on how the compiler handles some of these syntax enhancements, which I especially enjoyed reading about. The major features of each new addition is discussed in more detail and the less common methods are given a one-sentence description, which suits me, personally, quite well as long as I agree with what's common and what's not.

Talking about agreeing on what's common, the only real gripes I have with "Java 2, v5.0 (Tiger) New Features" is that the author completely by-passes the addition of java.lang.instrument and java.lang.management packages, only mentioning that those have been added. I would've certainly expected to read at least a page worth of overview on the actual services those packages provide.

In summary, I'd say you can't go wrong with this book. It's not a "complete reference" nor is it intended to be. It's a quick path to knowing just enough to feel comfortable diving into Java code written "Tiger style".

Rating:
Summary: Lacks depth
Review: The book starts that it is ment for experienced Java programmers who want to get up to speed quickly. However it only touches each subject so lightly that an eperienced programmer would have had enough from the API documentation and other sources.

For example the chapter about autoboxing fails to mention what happens when you unbox a null object, while that would be the interesting case.

I also fail to understand how an entire chapter can be devoted to the enhanced for loop. The part about generics would require more chapters, one introduction and one more advanced part. When diving into generics things get complicated, but it is not described in this book.

The part about annotiation fails to mention that the @SuppressWarnings annotation is not implemented in 1.5



Rating:
Summary: A Fast Look at the Highlights.
Review: You can now get v5.0 from the site java.sun.com. This book is a fast and quick way to get an overview of what new features are included the release. This is a fairly small book, it hits the highlights and moves on quickly. It is not intended for beginners, it presumes that you have the basics of Java down pretty well and are just looking to see what the new features might mean to you and the coding job your working on right now. Because it is a fairly small book, only a couple of hundred pages, it only hits the highlights of these new language extensions. It's enough to give you an idea if this feature will help you.

The V5.0 release is a prettly large release, incorporating a lot of new features. It's somewhat surprising to see this much being added to a fairly mature language that's been around for ten years or so.