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February 02, 2004

Review of the Java Cookbook

Java Cookbook
Ian F. Darwin
O'Reilly, 2001

In spite of the fact that it is supposedly written in the style of the Perl Cookbook, this book was a real disappointment. The cookbook format is intended for showing solutions to common problems. However, the author of this book appeared to be trying to force a tutorial and an API reference into a cookbook format. The result is not really a cookbook, or a tutorial, or a reference.

The chapter on threading was a particular disappointment. The author regularly misused the term deadlock and did not cover useful threading classes like Timer. If you know almost nothing about the Java programming language or are very rusty with the language (as I was when I read this book) it is possible to learn a few things from this book. However, I have to believe that it would be done better elsewhere.

Overall, I can't think of any reason to recommend this book.

Posted by GWade at February 2, 2004 10:25 PM. Email comments