Rating: 

I had the opportunity to look at the draft version of this book, shortly before it was due to be published. As I am an internationalization engineer, so this book was definitely a hit with me. The content is very organized and attempts to cover every aspect of this field; the authors must have put in a lot of work. A few notes:

- I liked the chapter about writing systems, because it covered the more obscure stuff as well, which I am not familiar with.

- The date/time/number formatting chapter is maybe a little bit too verbose. It goes into great details on something rather straightforward, things that anybody can easily figure out from the API reference of the relevant classes.

- My experience shows that most code developes, managers, testers and other software folks strongly believe that 'localization is just translation' and there is no need for investment on internationalization at all. The best way to convince these people is to show actual examples of cases when a software was not internationalized and caused revenue losses to a company. I can't recall seeing too many examples in the book; probably because the autors took it for granted that the reader is aware of the importance of this topic.

- I had to write a 'JSP internationalization' document for in-house use in our company and I overlooked a tricky issue. It was somewhat satisfying to see that the JSP chapter of this book overlooked the same issue, too ;-) But maybe I am too cheeky with this. I will publish the problem and its solution once I have fully investigated it myself.

All in all, I think this is a very good book; it will be a great reference material for anyone involved in internationalization in any way.

Hope this helps,

Peter