Book Review: Java 2 by Ivor Horton

Beginning Java 2

ISBN 1-861002-23-8 Price £45.99
Written by Ivor Horton 19 chapters, 5 appendices and index in 1058 pages

Chapter List

A note from the author followed by the introduction

    1    Introducing Java
    2    Programs, Data, Variables and Calculations
    3    Loops and Logic
    4    Arrays and Strings
    5    Defining Classes
    6    Extending Classes and Inheritance
    7    Exceptions
    8    Streams, Files and Stream Output
    9    Stream Input nd Object Streams
    10    Utility Classes
    11    Threads
    12    Creating Windows
    13    Handling Events
    14    Drawing in a Window
    15    Extending the GUI
    16    Filing and Printing Documents
    17    Images and Animation
    18    Talking to Databases
    19    The JDBC in Action

Appendix A

                Setting Up
                The JDK
                The Book Source Code

Appendix B

                The JAR File Format
                Using the jar Utility
                    Jar Options
                    Creating a JAR
                    Updating an Archive
                    Listing the Contents of an Archive
                    Extracting the Contents of an Archive
                JARs and Applets

Appendix C

Keywords

Appendix D

ASCII Codes

Appendix E

                Computer Arithmetic
                    Binary Numbers
                    Hexadecimal Numbers
                    Negative Binary Numbers
                    Floating Point Numbers
    Index A
    Index B

Synopsis

If you want to know anything about Java 2 programming methods and some in depth knowledge as well then this publication gives you all the answers. Most programming languages are nobbly and hard to understand with extra confusion thrown for for good measure. Java 2 gives you all the basic facts and then explains the rest in a way that will be remembered.

Review

As we all know Java is completely cross platform. Not completely though because at the time that I write this review the Blackdown Java for Linux project isn't completely finished. See... http://www.blackdown.org for more info. There is a JDK 1.2 for Linux at that address but it's not quite finished yet.

Having said that you can easily and quickly get to where it's at with Linux and Java 2 by Ivor Horton. The main thing is to get to the point where you can ignore the "helpful advice" from people who claim to be JDK 1.2 for Linux "experts" and just use the command line to the streams/ classes etc. This can be very difficult as a lot of very experienced programmers will always tell you that they know it all :-( After that all you have to do is read the book.

The fact that it is just over 1000 pages long does make it something of an intimidating book but you have to realise that you might only need to use any of five or ten pages at any one time. The structure of the book is particularly useful and is very much the same throughout the Wrox Press books. At the start of every one of them there is a gray box which says.....

These boxes hold important, not-to-be-forgotten information which is directly relevant to the surrounding text

This might look a bit silly but it does help the reader quite a bit and it also means that you don't have to ruin a well thought out book with a biro or a pencil :-) As well as this there are other boxes for definitions of Java methods and structures.........

if (life==aimless)
{
DoSomething; // Italics show that words should be replaced
DoSomethingElse; // with something more meaningful
}

So...... as you can see, this makes reading and understanding Java2 much easier. From the info above you might understand that Java 2 starts with the main terms and concepts to underline your own knowledge and then goes on to give a clear explanation of data types and other structures and gives examples of how to use these in practical situations. Next Java class libraries are introduced and explained and then a largish application is described so that you can have a go yourself. The end bit shows what to do with the tools that are part of the JDK 1.2.

If you have the JDK 1.2 you can download the source code for the book from................. http://www.wrox.com

Review by Richard Ibbotson