Java Programming Language

Ray Duncan

A Small Cuppa' Java

The Java Programming Language Handbook is, true to its title, a primer for the Java programming language -- and little more. Books just like this one are being churned out by the dozens by C/C++ writers and programmers hoping to retool themselves for a rapidly growing, sexy market segment. Since the ground covered by the shorthand term Java is extremely broad, but the Java language proper is, in fact, quite a simple one (one wag has referred to it as "C++--") a great many fascinating topics are left essentially untouched by this book: the evolution of Java, the Java Virtual Machine, the organization of the Java class libraries, the structure of the Java AWT application framework, relative merits of Java development environments, p-code interpretation versus just-in-time compilation, security mechanisms, and JavaScript -- to name but a few.

The Java Programming Language Handbook is organized and developed in a manner that I found logical and easy to read. Unfortunately, while the book starts out well -- presumably while it is covering the C/C++ -ish territory that is not too far from the authors' previous experience -- in the last few chapters it becomes completely unconvincing. The description of AWT is a rehash of documentation available from Sun for free, and the authors' treatments and coding examples for the layout manager, networking, streams, and database connectivity are simply too superficial to be worth the bother. The authors would have been better off to defer these topics to a separate volume, perhaps after they had acquired a bit more practical experience with Java programming themselves.

There are some subtle but odd things about this book when you look at it closely. Lucid passages are mixed willy-nilly with malapropisms and such historical atavisms as: "If you are creating large arrays of long integers you could be really asking for trouble. For example, if you created a two dimensional array of long integers that had a 100x100 grid, you would be using up 100 kilobytes of memory." Gosh, 100 whole KB! In another spot, the book speaks glowingly of "drop-and-drag" programming. This is as jarring to the reader as a reference to "Hammerstein and Rogers" in a book that claims to be an authoritative overview of American musicals.

The Java Programming Language Handbook is best suited, I think, to casual C/C++ programmers. Veteran C++ programmers will find it simplistic, while Visual Basic programmers will complain that it takes too much for granted. The book has some of the same problems with editing and typos that we have encountered with several previous Coriolis Group books. However, it does represent a significant improvement in design values for the publisher. Bulk for bulk's sake has been forgone, for once, and the cover art, internal layout, use of figures, and typography all are considerably above the standard-of-ugliness found in Coriolis books such as Netscape and HTML Explorer (LeJeune, 1995).--Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books