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Developing Java Software
Simon P. Chappell writes "It's good to learn a programming language, but it's a far better thing to learn to write programs in that language. What the world needs are less programming language books and more books on programming with the language of your choice. Enter Developing Java Software, 3rd edition by Russel Winder and Graham Roberts. Dr. Winder is the primary author and I became aware of this book when he mentioned it on the Groovy mailing list. Knowing him to be an intelligent and helpful member of the Groovy development team, I rushed to suggest that I could review it for him." Read the rest of Simon's review.
Developing Java Software (3rd edition)
author
Winder and Roberts
pages
885 (19 page index)
publisher
Wiley
rating
7/10
reviewer
Simon P. Chappell
ISBN
0470090251
summary
A good book for learning to write programs with Java.
Developing Java Software is a text book, and is targeted towards university undergraduates, most likely in some form of computer science curriculum. It is also completely suitable for self-learners who want to teach themselves how to write software in Java. The book has been used by the authors when teaching undergraduate classes at University College London, so it has been fully tested in the academic environment.
There are five parts, with twenty four chapters between the first four parts and ten appendixes in the fifth. Each of the chapters are short, most are less than 40 pages, tightly focused and fairly self-contained.
The first part, the longest of them all, starts out with the introduction chapter that no book is complete without. Really, how many people who want to learn Java don't know that it used to be called Oak and was originally designed for set-top boxes? Anyway, after that little excursion, the book moves onto useful stuff like "Programming Fundamentals", introducing concepts like statements, variables and expressions. Next is "Adding Structure" where we discover methods and control structures. Chapter four is "Introducing Containers" and does a good job of covering arrays and the whole slew of container data structure classes in the standard library. Chapter five is a little time off for good behaviour, where we get to spend some time "Drawing Pictures" before heading into chapter six for "Classes and Objects". Chapter seven explains "Class Relationships" while chapter eight introduces us to "Exceptions". Chapter nine is "Introducing Concurrency with Threads". We finish up with chapter ten covering "User Interfaces".
Part two addresses the "Process of Programming" and this is where it really differentiates itself from the rest of the Java book crowd. Chapter eleven gives an overview of "The Programming Process". Chapter twelve begins the process of making that real by addressing "Unit Testing". Chapter thirteen continues the story with "Test-driven Programming Strategies". More practical advice comes in chapter fourteen as they introduce the reader to "Programming Tools".
Part three brings two "Case Studies in Developing Programs". Chapter fifteen introduces the case studies. The first study, "Contacts Book" is in chapter sixteen and the second, a "Pedestrian Crossing Simulation" is in chapter seventeen.
Part four is "The Java Programming Language in Detail". This is the more reference portion of the book and it's seven chapters cover variables, types and expressions, flow-control, classes and packages, inheritance and interfaces, exception handling, threads and concurrency.
Part five is the "Endmatter" and holds ten appendixes.
The first thing to like with this book is that it has an engaging style. The style comes not just from the body text, but also from the notes, tips and references in the margins of the book. As someone who learned Java almost ten years ago, I have difficulty plowing through yet more body text explaining the same old stuff that every other Java book covers; yet, jaded and cynical as I am, I enjoyed the sparks of honesty and humour in the text.
As I alluded to in my opening remarks, this book takes the approach of trying to not only teach Java, but how to approach and actually write programs using Java. The book takes an iterative approach and emphasizes the use of testing tools. Interestingly, they use TestNG rather than the de facto standard JUnit. This is the first book that I've seen that uses TestNG; perhaps JUnit is finally getting some competition?
The book is completely targeted at Java 5. All of the code examples use the new features where appropriate. This makes the book worth considering for those that already know Java but want to finally climb onboard with the latest version.
Naturally, there is a website available at www.devjavasoft.org where all of the source code for the programs in the book may be downloaded, together with answers to the exercises and any updates or revisions of the material in the book.
One of the challenges of writing or updating a book of this size is that it's possible (nay, almost guaranteed) to miss important things. The tip at the top of page 190 is a classic example, where the reader is advised that calling System.gc() will force the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to perform a garbage collection. This is not, and has never been, true. The most that the System.gc() call will do is let the JVM know that now would be a good time for it to garbage collect, but there are no guarantees that any collection will actually take place. With this being the third edition of the book, I expected errors of this sort to have been caught by now.
Another point to consider is that with this being a textbook the writing style is less like a mass-market book and it also includes questions and exercises at the end of each chapter. I normally avoid books of this sort, although this does seem to be one of the better ones.
I hate being picky about typography, especially with the average level being quite good these days, but this book is set in a smallish font for the amount of text on each page. It is a serif font, but I didn't find it the most comfortable to read. Also, and this is the most egregious fault in the whole book, the program listings are set in a proportional font! I could hardly believe it when I saw it. While I realize that the authors are unlikely to be responsible for the final font selections, I fear that it damages an otherwise strong book and does them a disservice.
This is a good book for learning Java. More importantly, it's a good book for learning to write programs with Java.
You can purchase Developing Java Software 3rd edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Developing Java Software is a text book, and is targeted towards university undergraduates, most likely in some form of computer science curriculum. It is also completely suitable for self-learners who want to teach themselves how to write software in Java. The book has been used by the authors when teaching undergraduate classes at University College London, so it has been fully tested in the academic environment.
There are five parts, with twenty four chapters between the first four parts and ten appendixes in the fifth. Each of the chapters are short, most are less than 40 pages, tightly focused and fairly self-contained.
The first part, the longest of them all, starts out with the introduction chapter that no book is complete without. Really, how many people who want to learn Java don't know that it used to be called Oak and was originally designed for set-top boxes? Anyway, after that little excursion, the book moves onto useful stuff like "Programming Fundamentals", introducing concepts like statements, variables and expressions. Next is "Adding Structure" where we discover methods and control structures. Chapter four is "Introducing Containers" and does a good job of covering arrays and the whole slew of container data structure classes in the standard library. Chapter five is a little time off for good behaviour, where we get to spend some time "Drawing Pictures" before heading into chapter six for "Classes and Objects". Chapter seven explains "Class Relationships" while chapter eight introduces us to "Exceptions". Chapter nine is "Introducing Concurrency with Threads". We finish up with chapter ten covering "User Interfaces".
Part two addresses the "Process of Programming" and this is where it really differentiates itself from the rest of the Java book crowd. Chapter eleven gives an overview of "The Programming Process". Chapter twelve begins the process of making that real by addressing "Unit Testing". Chapter thirteen continues the story with "Test-driven Programming Strategies". More practical advice comes in chapter fourteen as they introduce the reader to "Programming Tools".
Part three brings two "Case Studies in Developing Programs". Chapter fifteen introduces the case studies. The first study, "Contacts Book" is in chapter sixteen and the second, a "Pedestrian Crossing Simulation" is in chapter seventeen.
Part four is "The Java Programming Language in Detail". This is the more reference portion of the book and it's seven chapters cover variables, types and expressions, flow-control, classes and packages, inheritance and interfaces, exception handling, threads and concurrency.
Part five is the "Endmatter" and holds ten appendixes.
The first thing to like with this book is that it has an engaging style. The style comes not just from the body text, but also from the notes, tips and references in the margins of the book. As someone who learned Java almost ten years ago, I have difficulty plowing through yet more body text explaining the same old stuff that every other Java book covers; yet, jaded and cynical as I am, I enjoyed the sparks of honesty and humour in the text.
As I alluded to in my opening remarks, this book takes the approach of trying to not only teach Java, but how to approach and actually write programs using Java. The book takes an iterative approach and emphasizes the use of testing tools. Interestingly, they use TestNG rather than the de facto standard JUnit. This is the first book that I've seen that uses TestNG; perhaps JUnit is finally getting some competition?
The book is completely targeted at Java 5. All of the code examples use the new features where appropriate. This makes the book worth considering for those that already know Java but want to finally climb onboard with the latest version.
Naturally, there is a website available at www.devjavasoft.org where all of the source code for the programs in the book may be downloaded, together with answers to the exercises and any updates or revisions of the material in the book.
One of the challenges of writing or updating a book of this size is that it's possible (nay, almost guaranteed) to miss important things. The tip at the top of page 190 is a classic example, where the reader is advised that calling System.gc() will force the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to perform a garbage collection. This is not, and has never been, true. The most that the System.gc() call will do is let the JVM know that now would be a good time for it to garbage collect, but there are no guarantees that any collection will actually take place. With this being the third edition of the book, I expected errors of this sort to have been caught by now.
Another point to consider is that with this being a textbook the writing style is less like a mass-market book and it also includes questions and exercises at the end of each chapter. I normally avoid books of this sort, although this does seem to be one of the better ones.
I hate being picky about typography, especially with the average level being quite good these days, but this book is set in a smallish font for the amount of text on each page. It is a serif font, but I didn't find it the most comfortable to read. Also, and this is the most egregious fault in the whole book, the program listings are set in a proportional font! I could hardly believe it when I saw it. While I realize that the authors are unlikely to be responsible for the final font selections, I fear that it damages an otherwise strong book and does them a disservice.
This is a good book for learning Java. More importantly, it's a good book for learning to write programs with Java.
You can purchase Developing Java Software 3rd edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Good advice for Java 1.5 and up, but without autoboxing you'll be using primitives because of their pervasiveness in the JDK.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
You know, I bet it's also a good book for learning how to develop applications with Java.
I think after checking this out more on Amazon.com I am going to pass on this particular book. Not only is it $65... $15 more than usual Wrox books (which I personally like) but it also seems to have a lot of condensed information with potentially useless programming situations... I find it hard to believe that the reviewer did not find much wrong with the book and only gave it an 7/10? If we convert that into a grading scale, obviously thats 70%... thats struggling to get points across, and will be adequate for basic points ofr JAVA 5. As a suggestion, I would love to see a review of a good JAVA 6 book, so I know what others have checked out, so I can make an educated decision on what my nice shiney new JAVA 6 book will be.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
...is Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java which has already invented the idea displayed here. Thats why you'll see that this book (tij) doesn't fully go into the bare Jave code but mostly reflects on the things which really matter. Knowing what things like Objects are, why objects differ from primitives, etc. Being a Java enthousiast myself it still amazes me how many people "program in Java" yet never learned how to interpret the JDK documentation, especially the so called API documentation.
Anyway, the Thinking in Java book is both available for free download (see URL above) and if you wish a hardcopy (or the latest release) then you can also purchase it. In my opinion this is a much better book which is also presented in a more fair way.
chapter ten covering "User Interfaces".
Was the ink from the first printing dry before Chapter 10 became outdated and deprecated?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I can't disagree more. Most programmers already know programming pretty well, and don't need their books on specific programming languages to be diluted with general programming instruction. Each of us is a programming amateur just once (I hope), but learns many additional languages throughout his career, and I think we want those non-newbie books to be concise and get to the point.
Every new programmer must learn to program in some language, but we certainly don't need a large variety of books that cater to people at that stage of proficiency - just one or two good ones.
... is more skilled programmers. I learn new languages from the language specification. Once you know how to write code in one language, and you actually _understand_ what you are doing, picking up a new language is easy.
Any Java book that starts with explaining statements, control structures etc. without first explaining what an object and a class is, does not sound very promising. In the CS educators community there is a movement towards an 'objects-first' approach in teaching JAVA, or more precisily, OOP using JAVA. Any book that typically starts with a 'hello world' program completely misses the point. First teach what an object is, what a class is, only then say something about how you can make these objects work together. This seems to be a much more fruitful approach in teaching students how to think OO, and then to put their ideas into any programming language, which happens to be JAVA in many cases. For a very good book to use in a programming 101 class, see 'Objects First With Java' by Barnes&Kolling (Prentice Hall; 3rd edition; June 2006)
To be fair, the typeface must have been really abysmal. I mean, it knocked 3 whole points off the score of an otherwise perfect book!
I can't recall ever having a grade on anything I've written drop from an A+ to a C- based on what font I used. This guy REALLY hates proportional fonts.
"It's good to learn a programming language, but it's a far better thing to learn to write programs in that language. What the world needs are less programming language books and more books on programming with the language of your choice"
Not really, I agree with Steve McConnell when in his book "Code Complete" (2nd edition) says that you shouldn't programm in a language but INTO a language.
Most of the important programming principles not on an specific language but on the way one use them. Don't limit your programming thinking only on the concepts that are supported automatically by your language. The best programmers think of what they want to do, and then they assess how to accomplish their objectives with the programming tools at their disposal. (McConnell 843)
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Yes, but what good is that if you don't know how to achieve enlightenment. Maybe what is really need is a book that teaches the Java language, AND how to go about the development process in a good way while using the Java language, AND how to achieve enlightenment while going about the development process in a good way while using the Java language. I mean, otherwise, what's the point? Or, on the other hand, maybe you just need a book that teaches Java.
I'm not trying to speak negatively about this particular book's contents, but just comment generally in response to a previous poster's reply. I think what we need less of is books that tell us how to use API's and control structures and logic as such. What we really need is a shift in the way we're taught to program in schools to mimic real world software creation. This book would more appropriately been titled "How to Program in Java" because development in the real world is quite different from just learning the language specifics. Software development is more about the deadlines you need to meet for the customers end and the balance between the most technical solutions and the most feasible ones. Essentially it's about the efficiency you complete a task given constraints of time and resource. We should stop writing books that just walkthrough different languages, and start teaching students in a way that places them in team projects and make them collaborate to complete projects. My undergrad school had only ONE class that was designed in this fashion, yet I would say that almost 100% of my work existence operates in this reality.
The first example of the use of continue made me want to cry!
If you're not the baby Jesus, you don't count.
Besides, continue is just a fancy way to do a break followed by a goto. Anything that keeps manual goto statements out of code is a good thing.
A good JVM will run this code nearly as fast...
Translation: "Lots of JVMs will run this code so slowly that your customers will think their machines have locked up."
In some cases it is possible to control what JVM your customer uses. I once managed a Java dev team that produced great, fast code, including excellent Java3D graphics stuff. But performance on some customer's machines was terrible, because they were running one of those all-too-common JVMs that wasn't so good. My solution was to ship a good JRE as part of our install, hidden away in the application tree and used only by our application (thereby not breaking every other application on the machine that depended on the bad JRE's bugs.) This increased the size of our installer by 15 MB or so, but it was worth it to get a better customer experience. Our support calls dropped to almost nothing after that.
However, not everyone shipping a Java application has this luxury, particularly those writing fo rthe Web. To suggest to those people that they should adopt some particular programming practice because it won't cause major issues with a "good" JVM is like telling a drowning person that water is necessary for life. It's true, but it isn't the least bit relevant to the practical predicament the person is in.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
My current favorite Java programming book is Java Concurrency in Practice by Broan Goetz and others. It's not for beginners, but if you really want to understand how to write multi-threaded code in Java you need to read this book. Several times, probably, because it's a tricky subject.
Other books I like for Java are Effective Java (though he needs to update it for Java 1.5) and Java Puzzlers.
I don't know of any books that are good descriptions of the Java 1.5 features for experienced programmers. Some people like Thinking in Java, but it seems pretty wordy to me. I originally learned Java from Java in a Nutshell but it's been something like 8 years, so I don't know if the newer editions are any good.
Disclaimer: some of the authors of these books are my co-workers, though I don't know them very well.
Well, personally, I had my grade drop from an expected A+ to an F when I used nothing but wingdings in a 10 page paper...
I'm finally glad to see some truly wise words, not to be mistaken for the more popular cynical opinion I see. I have experienced this myself. With that said, I would hope the title reviewed does focus on how, as you appropriately quote, "accomplish their objectives with the programming tools at their disposal".
The professors' plight: Every year the same material, just a different group of wingdings.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
You might want to check out this cool new markup language called "HTML" (hypertext markup language). It will allow you to bold or italicize words, thus obviating the need for surrounding words with underscore characters to indicate emphasis.
Of course, if you're really 1337, you'll pretend you're on a terminal with non-destructive backspaces and use a construct like this^H^H^H^H____ for underlining.
Sometimes theory has to bend to make room for the practical.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Java is not C++.
Neither is it C# - you'll be wanting Integer, not Int, except that for large amounts of number crunching that's a truly horrible idea. Mind you, for large amounts of number crunching Java isn't a particularly good idea in the first place if performance is key.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Learn the libraries to write fast code. Don't concatenate, use StringBuffer-s. Don't use buffer.append("a" + "b") - kinda defeats the purpose :) . Don't copy arrays to add an element, use Vector/ArrayLists. Don't do linear search, use Hashtable/HashMap. Don't insert into sorted arrays/vectors, use TreeSet. Don't search inside a Vector, use HashSet. Learn how to write objects that can be hashtable keys (i.e. they must have proper equals() and hashCode()). Learn how to write objects that can be used inside Tree-s (i.e. they must be Comparable-s that have proper equals() and compareTo()). Learn how to make objects sortable or implement Comparable correctly.
Yeah, kinda basic but you will be amazed what kind of speed improvements you can get by learning these and using them whereever it is appropriate. With the proper data structure (most of them are already in the JDK) your app will fly.
Oh, and don't redraw AWT/Swing like crazy. That's why the app is so slow. Learn how to use invokeLater to avoid deadlocks/bad data, etc.
Learn how to synchronize properly with no deadlocks and what wait() and notify() are for.
Learn char and byte streams and learn memory streams (ByteArrayInput/OutputStream, etc).
Learn to love try-finally for dealing with streams.
Learn to log.
Learn by writing actual app code. Nothing beats that.
First of all, String and the primitive wrapper classes are used by most of the core classes like ClassLoader and Class. If they could be overridden, it would be a gigantic security hole. Also, many crucial mechanisms rely on those classes' immutability, so allowing for the possibility of a mutable subclass would introduce considerable instability.
Second of all, people all too frequently seem to want to use inheritance for every task. Inheritance is not a toy. It's a String and some other data, not a new kind of String or a String with specialized behavior. Subclass when you must, not whenever you can. As someone else pointed out, you're far better off using a class (such as java.text.AttributedString) that aggregates a String and your other attributes of interest.
The Internet is full. Go away.
You don't know as much as you think you know, especially about Strings. To begin with, I suggest you do some Google searches for the phrase "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Now then...
You don't seem to be aware that the following two lines are either identical, or so close to identical in their execution that you will never be able to discern the difference with any debugger or benchmark:
System.out.println("The product of " + a + " and " + b + " is " + (a * b));
System.out.println(new StringBuffer("The product of ").append(a).append(" and ").append(b).append(" is ").append(a * b));
Details are here.
It is true that in Java 1.0, StringBuffer was always the better way to concatenate. But that was over ten years ago. Modern Java programmers know you don't use StringBuffer unless you're doing frequent concatenations (such as inside a loop). And professional programmers know that readability and maintainability are way more important than saving a few cycles in some logging statement.
Wrong. Concatenation of constants results in a single constant at compile time. In other words, the following lines will compile into byte-for-byte identical bytecode:
System.out.println("Today" + ' ' + "is" + " December " + 13);
System.out.println("Today is December 13");
Feel free to try it for yourself if you don't believe me.
The Internet is full. Go away.
(note that this doesn't apply to C# programs written with Visual studio, I'm not sure why C# runs under a VM considering that it was designed for Windows only)
.NET developers don't need to worry about switching between 32 or 64-bit systems.
It allows the same binaries to run on Windows on different processors -
Java may not perform quite as fast as C/C++, but the difference is neglible, and is only noticable in applications requiring alot of processing.
Actually, it can be the other way around. The more processing, the more chance that the run-time profiling and optimising gets to work, the faster Java runs.
Java programs are however slower to start, since they require that the JVM be started and the JIT compilation to be performed.
The JVM starts fast, and modern Java does not require any JIT compilation before the program starts. Instead the interpreter starts running, and hotspot optimisation kicks in later.
The Swing toolkit, IMO, does a huge disfavor to Java in this regard. Because the entire toolkit is emulated, making the GUI slow, contributing to the general perception of Java as slow.
Was true years and years ago, not now. It isn't all emulated - Swing uses DirectX to write to displays on Windows, for example. I am not actually sure that 'emulated' is meaningful. Swing draws controls using the Windows graphics API. So does every other Windows app. These days, having custom controls is very common (just look at media players).
I much prefer the SWT toolkit, since it both integrates better with the native environment and performs better.
Not true any more either. SWT has a reputation for actually being slower than Swing on at least some platforms, such as X. (Anyway, what does 'native GUI' mean on X-Windows anyway?)
In fact most people wouldn't be able to tell a Java SWT app apart from a C/C++ GTK/Windows/Mac application.
With Java 6, the same is true for Swing - a lot of work has been put into that, especially with the Vista interface.
In my University, I was taught general concepts: structures, recursion, iteration, abstractions, conditions, logic, programming paradigms, etc., never tied to a specific language. In fact, we used to use a pseudo-language to express solutions to problems.
Real languages (Pascal, X86 assembler, basic, fortran, C, Java, C++, scheme, SQL) were used only in lab practices. It was pre-supposed that you already knew them or you had the basic concepts to learn them.
Whenever I see that someone has been taught an specific language at the university (sometimes a whole semester!), I tend to think that this person will not be able to fullfil his/her position, because he/she has been taugth an specific technology instead of knowledge. It's like a doctor that has been taught how to operate certain medical device instead of how the human body works.
Learn principles and then you'll be able to tell which language is the best at the job.
And as a nice side effect, you'll always be able to catch up with whatever shows up in the ever changing madness of IT.
And don't forget about StringBuilder
Do you really need thread-safe access to your buffer?
Every little helps.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle