Apache Jakarta Commons

Simon P. Chappell writes "This is a hard review to write because I feel that I should be biased in favour of this book. I was one of the original reviewers of the book proposal. I read it and said "Yes, they'll be lining up around the block for a book like this!" Well, maybe those weren't my exact words, but I did offer my endorsement. After all, the Jakarta project of the Apache Software Foundation has an excellent reputation for quality Java code products and the Commons is quite the supply of diamonds in the rough. What could go wrong?" Read on for the rest of Chappell's review to find out. Apache Jakarta Commons - Reusable Java Components author Will Iverson pages 338 (8 page index) publisher Prentice Hall rating 4 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0131478303 summary There are other books about the Jakarta Commons; buy one of those instead.

What's To Like

The book takes the reader on a journey through the Jakarta Commons. The Commons is like a massive utility library of Java code. Much of the code has been promoted out of the other Jakarta projects as it became more useful. One of the first such components was the Digester, which is a component to initialise a Java object from the contents of an XML configuration file. Very useful, originally from Struts and now used extensively by other Jakarta projects.

As the subject matter for a book, the Commons seems like a natural winner (I guess I have to say that!). There are so many components in the Commons that a guide to their types and usage does need to be available for developers.

Naturally, the book has a website to accompany it.

What's To Consider

Where to begin? I was actually surprised to find that I did not care for this book. The last review I wrote was for Mr. Iverson's very good Hibernate book. That was well written and structured. Unfortunately, this book feels kind of thrown together. The lack of care shows in the cramped layout and typesetting, the over-abundance of UML diagrams (a few here and there are great, but this felt like padding), code examples that can only be described as under-whelming and an approach that feels like an annotated telephone directory.

Despite the lack of quality of the primary chapters, they only actually account for the first 199 pages of the book. This is actually a very reasonable number of pages for a book, especially when you consider that classics like the first edition of Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" weighed in at about 220 pages. Sadly, the book then goes on for another 125 pages churning out what looks like repackaged JavaDoc for each of the major classes in the commons. You may like this, but it annoys the beans out of me and it'll reduce the score on one of my reviews faster than the Linux community can debunk a SCO IP infringement claim.

Summary

I really wanted to like this book. But it feels like someone was cranking the handle on a cash machine and thought that if they printed stuff about Jakarta, that the geeks would obediently buy it. Not this time. There are other books about the Jakarta Commons; buy one of those."

You could purchase Apache Jakarta Commons - Reusable Java Components from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:Interesting pricing

[jc42]

Hemp produces more pulp per acre than timber on a sustainable basis, and can be used for every quality of paper.

A couple of years ago, there was a book written on the history of the US drug laws. I've forgotten the book's (or author's) name, but he documented an interesting "coincidence": The campaign to outlaw cannabis/marijuana/hemp was basically done by the Hearsts. They owned a large amount of land that was mostly pulpwood farms. Just before the anti-marijuana campaign started, a new hemp-to-paper process was patented that produced paper at half the cost of the cheapest wood-based process. This essentially made the Hearts' pulpwood farms useless. They responded by bankrolling the anti-drug campaign, including lobbying Congress to include the Evil Weed in the list of drugs.

It never did make sense that such a mild euphoric would cause such a wildly off-scale response, until someone dug up the above history. Then it all made sense.

Pulpwood farming is still an industry in the US. And it's almost all big corporate farms. We know the attitude of the current Congress towards corporations, of course. So we can't expect any serious change in the drug laws any time soon. Not unless some major hemp growers start making a lot of campaign contributions.

A number of articles have been published recently discussing the statistics showing that most of the increase in drug arrests in the US over the past 15 years or so has been for marijuana. Some of these articles have mentioned that hemp is potentially a serious threat to big American tree-farming interests. But the articles I've read haven't actually explained the connection.

Re:Hey! buy the Jakarta Commons Cookbook

[rjshields]

I love cookbooks because they show you creative ways to use the library to solve real problems. The code snippets given get you up and running with a library almost immediately, as you have a working piece of code to use as a starting point for solving your own problem. Contrast that with writing code against a new library from scratch and you'll find a great learning aid and time saver.

If I want to read the API docs, I'll go to the Jakarta Commons website and read them. I don't want to waste money and trees on API docs used to pad out a book!

I haven't read the Jakarta Commons Cookbook yet, but it's on my reading list.