Mastering Java 2 (Mastering)

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant overview of Java technologies
Review: Having worked with Java technologies since 1995, I feel this is a brilliant book. Agreed - it does not go in depth into many of the topics it covers, but I do not feel that is its intent. The book is aimed at imparting a decent level knowledge of all the essential technologies behind the Java 2 enterprise platform.

The book does unfortunately contain a number of typing errors and non-compilable examples, mostly due to the fact that it was written before Java 1.2 was available (so the Swing package changed, for example) - check the errata list for this sort of thing.

If you are looking for a book that takes you through Java from the beginning to the end, without going too deep into any one topic, then this is the book. Business programmers especially will find this an invaluable aid. Hackers and people wanting to use fancy tricks and get the maximum power out of a particular part of Java should read the Java Docs distributed with the JDK, or get specialised books.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant overview of Java technologies
Review: Having worked with Java technologies since 1995, I feel this is a brilliant book. Agreed - it does not go in depth into many of the topics it covers, but I do not feel that is its intent. The book is aimed at imparting a decent level knowledge of all the essential technologies behind the Java 2 enterprise platform.

The book does unfortunately contain a number of typing errors and non-compilable examples, mostly due to the fact that it was written before Java 1.2 was available (so the Swing package changed, for example) - check the errata list for this sort of thing.

If you are looking for a book that takes you through Java from the beginning to the end, without going too deep into any one topic, then this is the book. Business programmers especially will find this an invaluable aid. Hackers and people wanting to use fancy tricks and get the maximum power out of a particular part of Java should read the Java Docs distributed with the JDK, or get specialised books.

Rating:
Summary: Incorrect references to Swing includes
Review: I bought this book yesterday and am returning it tomorrow after realizing that a lot of the example contained within it are incorrect and do not even compile. The book has references to: import com.sun.java.swing.*; which after some investigation I realized must have been renamed to import javax.swing.*; so any references to swing components in the example code do not work. A friend recommended "The Complete Reference - Java 2 - Third Edition" by Naughton / Schildt as an excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Do not buy this book
Review: I use this book as a reference for all topics. It covers everything from Swing to CORBA so when I need a little bit of information on a subject, I check it first. You can find plenty of in depth information online, so what else do you need?

Rating:
Summary: Do not buy this book
Review: I wish I'd checked out the reviews here before I hastily went and bought this book. It is a terrible book, bereft of any useful, real-world examples and full of typos. It skims over topics giving the reader no hope of fully understanding the concepts. This would be acceptable if it had a load of examples that you could use to get coding straight away but it doesn't. By Chapter 5 the only fully compilable code example (as opposed to snippets) was the mandatory "Hello World" program in Chapter 1.

Terrible book.