Instant Messaging Systems: Cracking the Code

Rating:
Summary: Do NOT Buy this book.
Review: I made the mistake of buying this book without checking other reader reviews.

After reading a few sections, I was apalled by how poorly edited and revised the text was - to the point that it severely detracts from the technical knowledge that one hopes to gain by buying it.

Written by an Indian development team, it seems the book's language was never edited and revised for native English readers. Many sentences border on being comical.

I promptly returned the book and have since purchased the Jabber Developer's Handbook by Dana Moore and William Wright. So far this latter book is quite helpful.

Rating:
Summary: This book is not recommended
Review: I made the mistake of purchasing this book without thoroughly looking through it. I saw some of the code samples and it looked interesting. I was primarily drawn to it because of the use of Jabber, which is referred to prominently on the back cover and in the first chapter.

The actual book is pretty bad. As a previous reviewer stated, the editing is horrible. Many of the sentences make no sense and go back and forth through past and present tense.

The system that the authors built and describe in the book is not a Jabber solution. They built their own IM system based on web services and basically built an adapter to link up to a Jabber server. They offer no reasons why they do not implement a full Jabber server/client system. Their examples make no sense.

I highly recommend that you stay away from this book.

Rating:
Summary: Awfully written and badly edited
Review: This book is terrible. Many of the sentences don't make sense. The book is full of misspellings, bad english, and typographical mistakes which make it unreadable. For example, all '-' characters are misprinted as a box character. The book is mostly comprised of source code listings with line by line annotated descriptions of what appears to be obvious descriptions. For example, descriptions such as "Line 374: Sets variable index to 0". for the obvious line of code "index = 0;". Read the materials on jabber.org and you'll save your money and learn more!