ACCU Home page ACCU Conference Page
Search   Contact us ACCU at Flickr ACCU at GitHib ACCU at Facebook ACCU at Linked-in ACCU at Twitter Skip Navigation

ACCU Menu

Advertisement

Advertisement

Membership

Join ACCU

Login

» Create an account

» Password Reminder

ACCU Buttons

Add them to your site:

ACCU: professionalism in programming (116x31 px)
ACCU: professionalism in programming (225x60 px)

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.
    View all alphabetically
Title:
Professional Java Programming
Author:
Brett Spell
ISBN:
1 861003 82 X
Publisher:
Wrox Press
Pages:
1110pp
Price:
£45-99
Reviewer:
Paul Whitehead
Subject:
java
Appeared in:
13-4
Overall, this book is easy to read and covers a good selection of topics. In doing so it meets its stated aim of 'providing an introduction to the major technologies you are likely to meet as a practicing programmer'.

The first of the five major sections deals with OO design and shows some novice OO design errors. For example, the matter of encapsulation is dealt with by stating that data members should not be made publicly available but accessed via Get/Set methods. Rightly understood, OO encapsulation is far more than this. No mention is made of design patterns when discussing OO design. This first major section deserves to be skipped by novice and more advanced OO designers alike.The other four major sections seem well balanced and cover their topics well.

However, the book is already a little dated. For example, in the chapter on 'Distributed Objects' SOAP is not even mentioned. It could be argued that SOAP is not a purely Java concept but then neither is CORBA which does get mentioned. One of the code samples from another chapter elicits a deprecated warning from the Java compiler I used (JDK 1.3.0).

Not all of the code samples will compile. The compilation issues can be solved easily but their presence indicates that the code samples haven't even been compiled, let alone tested.

In summary, whilst the book is very readable and covers most of the topics you would meet in programming using the Java language; I find it difficult to recommend it as a must-have due to its slightly dated content, poor section on OO design and some source code samples which do not compile.