Rating: 
Summary: Not useful to me
Review: I'm a hardcore Java developer. I develop non-trivial client/server applications 10+ hours a day for a living. The concept behind the book sounded useful. I was wrong. A big listing of classes and method signatures is not useful. How is...Socket: public void setOOBInline(boolean on) throws SocketException ... helpful information? It doesn't aid me in finding the method I need to do something, it doesn't aid me in figuring out what a method does... it doesn't help me to understand how to use a class or method, it is just raw information. Browsing through the on-line javadocs are far easier and more productive for me. If you want a good Java reference book, the "Java Class Libraries" books are FAR more useful (and I highly recommend them).
Rating:
Summary: Not useful to me
Review: I'm a hardcore Java developer. I develop non-trivial client/server applications 10+ hours a day for a living. The concept behind the book sounded useful. I was wrong. A big listing of classes and method signatures is not useful. How is... Socket: public void setOOBInline(boolean on) throws SocketException ... helpful information? It doesn't aid me in finding the method I need to do something, it doesn't aid me in figuring out what a method does... it doesn't help me to understand how to use a class or method, it is just raw information. Browsing through the on-line javadocs are far easier and more productive for me. If you want a good Java reference book, the "Java Class Libraries" books are FAR more useful (and I highly recommend them).
Rating: 
Summary: half of it useful
Review: nice and soft, printed on light thin paper, the book is divided in two halves. The first half has snippets of code showing how to do this and that, organized in package order (javax.swing are in the yet to be published 2nd volume). Very useful. The second half is a very detailed class documentation in alphabetical order. My take is that if you have an IDE like VisualAge, which allows you to browse through classes and methods, and their references, senders, implementors, then this section of the book is not necessary. On the other hand, if you leaf through the latest Java in a Nutshell... The first half of the book also reminds of Java Cookbook. Couple of things I am perplexed by all these example books is that when exposing an example with dates, they all use the Date class. Unfortunately, this class cannot represent a date prior to 1970, thus many birtdays of living adults today cannot be represented (CalendarDate should be used). The other difficulty in finding example is custom events, property change events, non-bean events.
Rating:
Summary: half of it useful
Review: nice and soft, printed on light thin paper, the book is divided in two halves. The first half has snippets of code showing how to do this and that, organized in package order (javax.swing are in the yet to be published 2nd volume). Very useful. The second half is a very detailed class documentation in alphabetical order. My take is that if you have an IDE like VisualAge, which allows you to browse through classes and methods, and their references, senders, implementors, then this section of the book is not necessary. On the other hand, if you leaf through the latest Java in a Nutshell... The first half of the book also reminds of Java Cookbook. Couple of things I am perplexed by all these example books is that when exposing an example with dates, they all use the Date class. Unfortunately, this class cannot represent a date prior to 1970, thus many birtdays of living adults today cannot be represented (CalendarDate should be used). The other difficulty in finding example is custom events, property change events, non-bean events.
Rating:
Summary: Cheap book, though not the best!
Review: Not really the best quick reference. Since it is cheap there is no harm in buying it.
Rating: 
Summary: A great reference for a language growing in complexity
Review: Once again, I have found a book for my special shelf of frequently used reference books that I keep within arms reach. This book starts with the Java library at the level of the package and then works down to the individual class level. I find such a reference absolutely essential and my copy of the original Java Developers Almanac has been used so often that the individual pages are falling out. I teach Java classes to experienced developers and I have always kept it at my side to answer those inevitable questions concerning prototypes and other methods available in a class.
The examples in this book make it more helpful than if it was just a listing of methods. While I can generally figure out how a method is used from the prototype, seeing it called in a plausible scenario generally reduces the time in going from bafflement to understanding. The book is also well indexed, so very little time is wasted in searching for the desired package or class.
I strongly recommend this book as a reference for the Java language, and it will appear on my list of top ten books of the year.
Rating: 
Summary: Convenient and complete
Review: Reference books follow an odd evolutionary path. The most successful reference books strive for heft - the bigger the better - often approaching prehistoric proportions. But sooner or later there comes a book that defies tradition and manages to be complete without breaking your desk, or your wallet. Patrick Chan's "Java Developer's Almanac" is that book. The first thing you'll notice about this book is the convenient form factor. This is 5.5"x8" book is small enough to carry comfortably and lays flat next to a keyboard without taking up the entire desk, but it is not so small that the print becomes indecipherable. It is truly printed in the style of an almanac - the same paper, the same form factor. That would be enough to make me buy it even if it didn't contain some great stuff inside. For the most part the book contains prototype declarations for every public and protected member of every Java class, all 18,837 of them. How do I know there are that many? Because one of the most interesting sections consists of statistics gathered from every Java release since 1.0. In addition the book contains detailed listings of what has changed - omissions and additions - between every Java release, including PersonalJava. Seeing the definitive list of changes from one version to another was fascinating (although it shows what a shambles the compatibility story is.) Nonetheless this book manages to capture the vary latest changes up to Java 1.2b3. It is just staggering to consider that there has been an order-of-magnitude growth in the number of methods since Java1.0!!! That's why I need this book. The prototypes are organized alphabetically by class making it easy to find just what you are looking for. There are notations where necessary for methods that are only available under certain Java versions. For each class, the inheritance hierarchy is reproduced and what interfaces that class implements is noted. Even though the contents are organized for speed, I like brow! sing this book just to get a feel for breath of the Java class landscape. Thankfully I will never need most of the 1592 classes and interfaces in the Java 1.2 class hierarchy but it's nice to know they're there in case I do. Unlike some authors that have let their Java books get mouldy while the language evolves, Patrick Chan has been writing and revising java reference books since he left the Java development team at Sun. He was one of the first people to write any substantive Java applets back when the whole Java group fit in one (small) room. Since then he has written or revised at least three (or more?) books on Java. I think this book will prove to be a useful addition to any experienced Java hacker's bookshelf. For newbies, this book in conjunction with a Java tutorial will show you that learning Java, the language, is only the beginning of learning Java, the class library.
Rating:
Summary: A Machine Generated Text
Review: The 1998 edition of this book was generated by a machine....as far as I can tell. It looks like a phone book, with the tiny print to match. Serious programmers will need the Java Class Libs vol 1 and vol 2 as well as other books for the javax packages and java3d, etc. The book is very compact, and does a nice job of compiling many classes together in one binder. It is only occasionally useful to me. Cute size!
Rating:
Summary: Good, succint and comprehensive
Review: The inclusion of 1.2(beta), CORBA and other extensions make this a very useful book to have. I personally feel it is a good complement to Flanagan's JiN because where that one excels as a good introductory + reference book, this one is just a terse listing of all classes, interfaces, methods and members of all those classes and interfaces. In addition to its breadth, the price is so right that you'd be a fool not to get it.
Rating:
Summary: concise, yet disorganized
Review: The Java Developer's Almanac is basically a gigantic listing of the majority of Java 1.2's classes and libraries. The book is lightweight and as dense as your average dictionary, which is great when all you're interested in is finding that certain special method. Unfortunately, it also resembles the first edition of O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell, which means it could use some improvement. The returned-by and passed-to information (absolutely essential for finding relationships) is stuck way in the back of the book. And all the classes are alphabetized by name rather than package, which leaves a lot of completely unrelated classes next to each other. In short, get O'Reilly's Nutshell first.
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