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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
Naked Objects
Author:
Richard Pawson&Robert Matthews
ISBN:
0-470-84420-5
Publisher:
Wiley
Pages:
275pp
Price:
£32-50
Reviewer:
Francis Glassborow
Subject:
object oriented; java
Appeared in:
14-6
I recently got an email with the title of this book as the subject. I very nearly threw it away unopened but I recognised the sender's address and took a risk on opening it. I only mention this to highlight how careful people should be with the subject lines of emails, particularly when dealing with books whose titles have been chosen to make you look twice.

A couple of years ago I first came across 'Agile' methodologies and it took me a while to realise that 'agile' had been given a specific meaning in programming, in other words it had become jargon. It took me a little less time to discover that 'Naked Objects' wasn't just a title to grab the eye , though I wonder if everyone would feel comfortable to be seen reading a book with this title plastered in large letters across the cover. To clarify the issue let me quote a paragraph from the introduction:

Naked Objects is an open-source Java-based framework designed specifically to encourage the creation of business systems from behaviourally-complete business objects. In fact, with the Naked Objects framework you have no alternative but to make your business objects behaviourally-complete. The reason is that the framework exposes your core business objects, such as Customer, Product and Order, directly to the user. All user actions consist of invoking methods directly upon those business objects, or sometimes upon the object's class. There are no scripts, no controllers, nor even any dialog boxes in between the user and the 'naked' objects. (Note: Wherever 'Naked Objects' is capitalized we are referring to the Java framework itself, and the term is singular. Where it is uncapitalized we are referring to business objects (plural) that are designed to work with the framework, and so are exposed directly to the user.)

This book is an excellent presentation of the subject and the publishers have taken care to use colour in various ways to help delineate various parts of the book. The book is hardcover and printed on quality stock. The contents start with a critical look at object-orientation before introducing naked objects. The author then introduces the Naked Objects framework before spending some time on the development process. It concludes with a brief chapter on extending Naked Objects.

The book also includes a number of case studies that help the reader put the theory into context.

There is good Internet support for the book and if you want to learn a little more before committing yourself to buying the book then a visit to www.nakedobjects.org would be advised. That is also the place to go if you are merely curious even though the subject is unlikely to have any application in your areas of expertise.

Overall this book is aimed at the subset of the Java Community that is concerned with business programming. If this includes you, then I think you should at least give the website a look and then buy the book if you want to pursue the subject.