Java(tm) in Practice: Design Styles and Idioms for Effective Java

Rating:
Summary: Among the best books
Review: A good intro to some advanced topics, class loading, patterns, etc. Reads very quick and well written.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Java OO book
Review: At last someone has written a Java book that concentrates on object design in detail. The first three chapters on encapsulation, inheritence and polymorphism provide the best introduction to these concepts I've read in a Java book.

Rating:
Summary: not a bad book, style has gotta go
Review: excellent book. love it. the coding style has gotta go though. name_=name

is not as easy to read as strName = name ( or something like that )

need more spaces in the code also. way to bunched up. this is java, not eiffel or modula-2! so program with a java style....

p.s. new programmers will benifit from this book, just don't pick the same code style.

take a look at Kernighan's and Pike's "The Practice of Programming". also a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Your (reading) mileage will vary
Review: I've been learning, teaching, and writing about Java since JDK 1.0., but I'm not formally trained in programming. I feel my way to certain programming ideas. So if a book articulates the thoughts that float around in my own murky brain, it's a treasure.

This book does some of that. It's a useful discussion of some common OOP idioms in Java. There's enough UML to illustrate the difference between a design concept and a Java implementation. The book is also brief, and doesn't try to justify its starting point; I like that. Keeping a book short takes courage.

On the whole, however, I was done with what this book had to offer in about five hours. There wasn't much in it to make me think I'd read it again, either. Several discussions didn't quite conclude. And there were one or two points where a continued discussion was promised and didn't appear. Instead of brevity by way of elegance, I felt that probably the publisher's deadline was looming large, and they had to cut bowstrings.

So I had pretty high hopes, and I got a decent experience out of the book. I've been at this for five years, so I'm probably looking for someone to state things in a bold, new way, and perhaps that's unreasonable to expect. For the price, this book's OK.

Rating:
Summary: hazy, misses the point. occasionally incorrect.
Review: In chapter one, for example, see the discussion on the benefit of encapsulation. The first benefit given is security ( see BankAccount / Customer example ). But really encapsulation only secures us from other programmers, and then only other programmers that do not have our code, so in reality it is a very meek form of security. The next benefit described is synchronization ( see discussion of the Point class ). But accessing variables through getters would not solve a synchronization problem, nor would it be neccesary to use getters to solve a synchronization problem. Finally performance is discussed. But the author's solution, which was using final methods, is still a lot slower than accessing an instance variable. He finally gets to the heart of the matter in the section titled "Extending encapsulated systems" but by that point it's just too little, too late.

Rating:
Summary: Good Java Design Book
Review: Overall, this book does a decent job of explaining good design techniques to the programmer who is already familiar with Java. There are plenty of code examples, along with UML diagrams to help explain the designs that are presented. There's even an appendix on UML for those unfamiliar with the modeling language.

There are some flaws in this book, however. The book is not updated for Java 2, and is therefore rapidly becoming obsolete. Additionally, a significant number of typos and inconsistent use of terms clouds the already difficult subject matter. Especially bad is the discussion of the Cloneable interface, in which the authors state that different compilers treat Cloneable classes differently, but do not explain what the correct behavior is according to the Java Language Specification or how to work around these compiler problems.

There is some good material in the book, but in my opinion not enough of it and too many problems in the presentation, to justify the cover price.

Rating:
Summary: excellent book
Review: This book is at the level somewhat between "java beginner" and GoF's "Design Patterns".

If you are familiar with the java syntax, and want to learn more OO design techniques, this book is THE one you are looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Among the best books
Review: This is definitely the best book I have come across. Looking forward to similar books from the same authors. Unfortunately this is the only one.