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

HowTo: How To Deal With A Shitty Book:

[Neil Blender]

Stop reading it the minute you realize it's shit.

Hey! buy the Jakarta Commons Cookbook

[BigTimOBrien]

:-)

I wrote a book on the Jakarta Commons - The Jakarta Commons Cookbook, and, from what I hear people like it. Really, you should read it, I tried to stay as far away from reference as possible and pack it full of useful recipes.

Re:Hey! buy the Jakarta Commons Cookbook

[greg1104]

Amazingly, this bit of self-promotion is actually more useful than the review. Tim O'Brien's book is my favorite on this subject and it's far, far better than the Will Iverson title. I particularly like how well it covers some of the extremely useful but not well documented APIs like the HttpClient, there are far more readable, usable examples that cover the kind of real-world issues you run into the minute you try to use that API than any other source I know of.

Larne Pekowsky: "Apache Jakarta and Beyond: A Java Programmer's Introduction" is also a decent title in this area, albeit a bit too broad to really do that good of a job on any topic. Even a 600 page book can't cover things like Eclipse or Ant in a chapter.

I have all three books on my Safari bookshelf right now; only O'Brien's is staying once I can remove the other two. The Iverson and Pekowsky titles have some interesting sections worth looking at once, while "Jakarta Commons Cookbook" I always want to keep around for reference, in the same fashion I already rely on the similarly useful "Java Cookbook".

FYI From The Author

[will_iverson]

I would just like to respond to the bit about "cash cow":

1. The book itself is published under an open license - the material in the book will be available as a free electronic download in a few months.

2. Yes, the last 125 pages *is* (for all intents and purposes) the printed javadoc. This was included at the request of the publisher, and it is valuable for some people.

So... I don't know how negatively the review was influenced by the inclusion of the Apache material, but it is entirely above-board per the Apache license and essentially reciprocal - I'm giving the material in the book back to the community via a free license to download the material.

Oh, and as an FYI, book writing is hardly a cash cow - I only wish. ;)

If folks have any questions (e.g. why the delay in making the electronic version available? What is the state of affairs for tech book publishing? Why aren't you rich writing books yet?) let me know...

Cheers & best wishes,

-Will Iverson