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Now that is quite a bold statement. The part that worries me is the 'bad boy' reference. Part of my work is getting rid of code generated by 'bad boys'. We have another name for them where I work.

I flicked through the book and realised that, despite the accompanying CD containing the entire source, about half the book is printed source code. Now a code fragment to illustrate a point is one thing. This is just 200 pages of padding. This is not a book to dip into and read as the sections of text are broken up by the long chunks of code.

Despite the claims, the content itself is not that revolutionary. It mainly concentrates on manipulation of graphics to make your web site look good, including some VMRL and 3D. The source for these manipulations and filters are provided. The techniques are not that advanced (they do look good though). There is not, to my mind, enough background theory to enable the reader to do much more than run the code and tinker. For serious work one will need a better graphics book.

Whilst it is aimed squarely at the PC web market there is little help on web site design at all. Incident-ally the CD contains, surprisingly, very few of usual raft of PD and shareware Java programs other books throw in. It does contain JDK and a couple of games.

This is a niche book, Java (on a PC) for web graphics. There are far better books on graphics though they tend to be in C/C++, better books on web design and certainly better Java books. I would not buy this book.