Book review: <I>Java 2 Primer Plus</i>

By Alun Williams

Posted on 14 Mar 2003 at 17:58

Having long considered getting to grips with Java, this book - Java 2 Primer Plus - helped me to make the plunge. I was the target audience, as the book is intended to serve as an introduction to Java programming.

According to the authors, their goal was for readers to walk away from the book with a solid foundation in the Java programming language so that, as new Java technologies evolve, they can add the details to a firm foundation. Have the authors succeeded? Yes and no.

This tutorial-based book is authoritative, well written, examples are clearly covered, and the content is well structured around the major features of Java. It certainly gave me the confidence to get up and running with Java programs of my own.

What's the catch? It's the wide-ranging, baggy-monster nature of Java itself. It is difficult to cover even all of the foundations in one book.

Topics of the book include classes, inheritance, interfaces, exception handling, IO, AWT and SWING (you can find the table of contents here). These are only the basics. The book goes on to cover wider areas such as database connectivity, network programming, servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), XML and Web architectures.

Not too long is spent on the syntax of the language, and the object-oriented side of the language for example, polymorphism, is dealt with briskly. But this is okay as the book is explicitly not about wider object-oriented isssues. Some examples - in the graphics area, particularly (all the different listener interfaces, for example) - are redundant, but this is forgivable as they serve to ram the underlying points home.

What's missing? The authors make the welcome point that programmers should be more than IDE-based power users and that they should have full manual control over their Java code. However, command line issues - such as compilation - are not covered, and the use of packages (beyond the standard Java class library itself) is left untouched. Similarly, jar and manifest files are only covered in passing in the section on JavaBeans, half way through the book. JavaDoc is covered rather cursorily, too. These are relatively minor points, but have represented little brick walls for my own Java development.

The micro and macro versions of Java 2 (J2ME and J2EE) are also absent. It is a shame about the former, as many phones nowadays support the use of Java. The authors would probably claim, quite fairly, that these involve the ever-changing details (mentioned above) that the Java user has to take on board when tackling the technology.

The book is certainly a heavy tome, all 800 pages of it, but there is a lot of white space. This is no bad thing, as the many code examples (full listings of small programs, not isolated snippets) are well laid out.

The authors favour a technique of presenting a listing and then explaining, paragraph by paragraph the important lines of code. I found this very helpful. You are free to study the full program at your leisure and know you will be guided across the key points.

Note that there is no CD with the book for code samples. Full listings are online, however. You can check the downloads out at www.samspublishing.com. Rather than code snippets you always have full listings. It was good to have easy access, for example, to a simple, working XML SAX parser program.