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The first 150 pages try to cover software development in general and manage little more than this example on 'Best Practices':

I.e. well intentioned but ultimately too shallow to be of any real use.

I also take exception to some of the author's 'example' code viz this little fragment on 'handling I/O Exceptions' (middle of the try block removed for brevity):

try{

// do some file i/o

}

catch (IOException iofex){

Message msg = new Message(new Frame(), "File Exception",

("An exception occurred writing to the file!"));

msg.setVisible(true);

return ("Error");

}

This has so many faults [user told 'exception' rather than user language, no mention of filename or any detail from exception, no logging of exception, and the mysterious return of a string "Error" from the method (whose signature we never see) for the error case] that I would hesitate to call it an 'example'.

The book has 6 different authors, who do make a reasonable job of writing in a consistent style; if only the book as a whole didn't have such a 'global' ambition.

While there are some good chapters on use of JBuilder, they are so thinly scattered to make this book neither a good reference nor an introductory text. The publication date of 1999 just adds to this book's problems, that it is written at a snapshot in time which ages far too quickly in the Java world.Perl, Python etc.