Master Java with these introductory books - JavaWorld May 2001
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Master Java with these introductory books
Master Java with these introductory books
By: By John Zukowski
Do these newly released books for Java beginners live up to their predecessors?
ntroductory Java books are a rather popular bunch. If you're interested in Java programming, you have to start somewhere. Most people pick up at least one book to get them started. More popular ones are those that have been around since the beginning of Java time -- close to six years now. Core Java (Prentice Hall, 2001) is one of those books and is already up to its fifth edition. Does anyone else remember when this book was only one volume and 622 pages? It's now spread over two volumes with more than 1,700 pages. While I don't mean those earlier books aren't any good (I'm working on the fourth edition of my own Mastering Java 2 ), sometimes a book's first edition is its best version, as the author isn't trying to jam new content into an old structure.
In this article, I'll review six introductory texts for Java. All of these books are first editions, not rewrites, and have all been released within the last year. I'll reveal if any of these books stand up to the older set of updated, introductory Java texts.
In alphabetical order, the six books reviewed here are:
Beginning Java Objects, Jacquie Barker (Wrox, November 2000)
Essentials of the Java Programming Language , Monica Pawlan (Addison-Wesley, May 2000)
Java 2: A Beginner's Guide, Herbert Schildt (Osborne, December 2000)
Java 2 Weekend Crash Course, Julio Sanchez and Maria Canton (Hungry Minds, December 2000)
Java: Your Visual Blueprint for Building Portable Java Programs, Dr. Ernest Friedmann-Hill (Hungry Minds, February 2001)
Professional Java Programming, Brett Spell (Wrox, December 2000)
Table 1 below provides a quick review of the main characteristics of the six books:
Table 1: Introductory Books Overview
Beginning Java Objects
Essentials of the JPL
Java 2: A Beginner's Guide
Java 2 Weekend Crash Course
Java: Visual Blueprint
Professional Java Programming
Price
$39.99
$34.95
$29.99
$19.99
$26.99
$59.99
Total Pages
660
300
570
430
300
1,100
CD-ROM /
Source Code on Web
No / Yes
No / Yes
No / Yes
Yes / No
Yes / No
No / Yes
Java Version
1.3
1.2
1.3
1.2*
1.3
1.3
OO Basics
Excellent
Average
Good
Average
Poor
Poor
Language Basics
Poor
Poor
Excellent
Good
Good
Poor
Client Side
Good
Good
Poor
Average
Average
Excellent
I/O
Average
Average
Average
Good
Average
Average
Threads
None
Poor
Average
None
Average
Good
Networking
None
Average
None
None
Average
Average
Server Side
None
Good
None
None
None
Average
Level
Objects Beginner
Beginning - Advanced
Beginning
Beginning
Beginning
Intermediate - Advanced*
Scale: None, Poor, Average, Good, Excellent
A star (*) in a field means the review of the specific book provides further details of the ranking.
For the most part, the above table is self-explanatory. After "Java Version," the rows describe the level of coverage, if any, each book offers on that topic. "Client Side" includes the coverage level for such topics as applets, AWT, Java 2D, and Swing. "Server Side" includes coverage of JDBC, servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), RMI, and the rest of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The final row describes the appropriate reader level.
A more detailed review of the individual books follows, including a comparison to the older beginner books. Is it time you stray from the classics and try something new? Read on and find out. Beside each book's title is a star rating, which is based on my review of the book's quality, level of topic coverage, and appropriateness for its target audience. One star is equivalent to a poor rating, and the highest rating (five stars) translates to exceptional coverage.
Beginning Java Objects
Jacquie Barker's Beginning Java Objects takes an objects-first approach at teaching Java programming. You'll learn how to do object modeling and how to translate that model into well-designed Java code. With a student-registration-system design serving as the backbone, the text works well as the lesson plan for an object-oriented methodology class.
If you are new to Java programming, Beginning Java Objects offers a taste of Java in the first chapter, and provides more depth 12 chapters later. For most readers, the taste is sufficient to get them started with Java and get them through the code used in the early chapters, which deals with modeling the system. Combining these two chapters (one and thirteen) is all the programming language explanation found in most introductory Java texts. Beyond the language, the only libraries covered in any depth are I/O and Swing. One surprise with the Java code was the book's use of Hashtable and Vector instead of the newer Java Collections Framework classes.
This book shines mostly in its coverage of object-oriented programming, which typically takes up only one chapter in an introductory text. You'll learn all about object modeling (even though Barker can't decide between one l or two in modeling). From use cases and object diagrams to sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams, you'll have a good grasp on the basics of Unified Modeling Language (UML) design by the time you are through reading Beginning Java Objects .
Essentials of the Java Programming Language
Essentials of the Java Programming Language by Monica Pawlan may already be familiar to you. It has been available online on Sun's Java Developer Connection for close to two years now. Consider the printed version a polished edition of the online offering. This tutorial takes you through the process of creating a general-purpose e-commerce system.
Its tutorial-based approach starts out with basic explanations of creating some simple Java programs. You get step-by-step instructions for creating an application, applet, and servlet. The explanations are interspersed with descriptions of such Java basics as classes, methods, and packages. Soon afterwards, topics jump into JDBC, RMI, socket communications, and internationalization, before concluding with an introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP) and an appendix on cryptography with Sun's Java Cryptography Extension (JCE).
While the last chapter on OOP seems a little out of place, with such varied lesson levels, the book's target audience seems unclear. Going from extreme hand-holding in the initial lessons, through the use of Oracle OCI 7.3.4 to setup the JDBC chapter, and onto creating a complex RMI system, I can't tell if Pawlan is targeting someone new to Java or an experienced veteran who needs help creating a working distributed system. As the cover states, the application "illustrates many of the Java 2 platform's most important elements," which seem to be the qualifying justification for including every concept in the book. Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient explanation on such topics as JDBC to create your own programs with the API after reading the book.
The text itself is well written and the created system demonstrates some good concepts on such topics as internationalization and RMI. The book would probably work out well for someone interested in learning about some server-side Java concepts with little explanation beyond the hands-on tutorial.
Java 2: A Beginner's Guide
Java 2: A Beginner's Guide by Herbert Schildt provides a goal-based approach to teaching the necessary skills to getting started with Java. Providing a language-first approach at teaching Java, Schildt explores the fundamentals of the language before delving into classes, objects, and inheritance. Full of many different learning aides, the beginning Java programmer should pick up Java quickly and get a feel for how well they are doing with provided self-assessment checks.
Broken into 12 modules, Java 2: A Beginner's Guide 's self-paced approach describes the core Java concepts, like the language fundamentals and object basics, quite well. With each concept are short one-minute drills with plenty of annotated code examples. There are also short projects interspersed throughout, with step-by-step walkthroughs that take you through creating a solution. Projects range from the simple to the complex, from demonstrating finalization to creating a disk-based help system. Schildt's approach works quite well, especially for the new Java programmer who needs a step-by-step guide.
Beyond the language and object fundamentals, the guide starts to look at some of the standard Java libraries. This is limited to the final three chapters. The libraries covered are I/O, multithreading, and applets. The I/O chapter has you work with byte and character-based I/O, while the multithreaded programming chapter has you create multiple threads, deal with synchronization, and send messages between threads. It even has a short write-up on suspending threads without using the language's deprecated features. The applets chapter is somewhat of a catchall chapter. Besides describing the applet architecture, it explains event handling and some new keywords like volatile and strictfp . Anything dealing with AWT or Swing components as well as drawing with Java is noticeably absent.
Finally, Java 2: A Beginner's Guide ends with two appendices. The first includes answers for the end of module questions, while the second describes Java's documentation comments syntax. The book's questions and answers should help readers get accustomed to testing for certification (though without multiple-choice answers), while the javadoc appendix provides a reasonable level of coverage of the javadoc tags, including the newer serialData and serialField tags.
Java 2 Weekend Crash Course
The premise for Java 2 Weekend Crash Course by Sanchez and Canton is that, given 15 hours of your time, you'll go from absolutely no Java programming experience on F
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