If I was trapped in a desert cubicle and allowed only one Java book this would
be it. I dig Sun's Javadocs that come with the SDKs, but Java in a Nutshell has proved invaluable to java developers. It is compact, easy to browse, and
provides a very handy language/SDK guide. With each major release of J2SE. This edition is no exception:
- most up to date coverage of SDK & language changes:
- assertions
- cryptography
- XML processing
- new IO facilities
- logging
- properties & preferences,
- collections changes
A quick search of Amazon yielded only one other book that is up to date for J2SE 1.4, and it was not a reference for experienced programmers. This nutshell reference is ahead of the pack.
However, there have been a few changes to this edition that aren't popular with me. I was a big fan of the quasi-UML class diagrams on the first page of each package. Especially for the IO and Util (collections) packages, it was a great way to see the architecture of an entire package. I could find out at a glance who implements a certain interface, or to find a common ancestor class. These diagrams are gone. Instead of having one diagram for all the elements (interfaces, classes, exceptions) in a single package, the authors present a class diagram for each individual class and place it with each class' entry. To somewhat make up for this, the author has provided expanded narrative at the beginning of each package, hitting the highlights and providing an almost javadoc style listing of the elements contained in the package.
I understand this was probably done for practical reasons. Some of the packages have grown very large with one or more subpackages (java.util being the biggest offender here) and diagrams for some of the packages wouldn't fit on the smaller pages of the Nutshell series. Irregardless, it a loss of key functionality for this edition.
Lastly, the authors removed the singlemost important navigational tool of the previous editions: the thumb tabs on the margins of the pages indexed by package. These tabs made it very easy to quickly flip to the exact package you were looking for. In this edition you have to rely on the page footers for this information.
Despite the small changes, this edition continues in the tradition of the Java in a Nutshell series: the most up to date java reference that is available on the market.
|
