Using Java 2 Platform: Special Edition (Special Edition Using...)

Rating:
Summary: Weber is a better programmer than author
Review: First, to echo what has been stated repeatedly in other reviews: there are WAY TOO MANY TYPOS in this book! This book was required for my Java class (who made that choice?), but I wish I could've picked another one. The typos crop up at a rate of about one in every two pages. If you're a relatively experienced programmer, it's not too hard to spot them and decifer the meaning (that is what an editor is supposed to do though, right?), but for a beginner they could prove to be a real problem. Even being able to spot and correct them for yourself, it tends to bring the pace of the book to a grinding halt causing one to have to re-read passages with the corrections in mind.

Secondly, the examples the author uses are horrible. While they might reflect the topic at hand, they are overly complicated most of the time and lack focus. Other times the author tries to amuse us with his examples (there's a Casey Jones theme that runs through the earlier chapters), but they tend to distract rather than educate. Even simple examples are often handled poorly. For example, almost every other programming text, when illustrating booleans, tend to liken them to a switch being on or off, or a simple conditional situation as being true or false, etc. In this book we are given the example of a piece of paper being on or off of a table. Granted, there is nothing technically wrong with this, but it just seems like the author is trying to hard to be different.

Lastly, I don't like the author's technique of showing poor programming style and then later on showing how it can be improved. This is mainly because he often doesn't point out that the poor example is illustrating this fact. For example, early in the discussion of classes we are shown many examples that have public data members. It isn't till somewhat later that we are told, no, these should actually be declared private with public access methods. Once again, to a novice programmer, I think this tends to muddy the point, causing one to have to go back and look at prior examples a second time in order to realize that they were illustrating poor programming style.

Overall I feel that Weber is a competent and knowledgeable Java programmer, but he's not an effective educator. I would heartily recommend "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel over this book. I give this book two stars mainly because the info is in there, but is just too much of a pain to extract it. I'd probably rate it higher if they'd re-edit the book and make it freely available to those who already bought this edition.

Rating:
Summary: Using Java 2 Platform: Special Edition
Review: I bought this book thinking that it covers most of the topics in JAVA but I was wrong. It does cover all the topics but not a single topic is covered well.... there are "tons" of errors in this book. Most of the time the book contradicts itself. I would recommend " Java2: A Completee Reference" by Patrik Noughton for the beginers and the advanced Java Programmers.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of array of topics, easy to understand.
Review: This book covers a ton of things about the Java language. Some reviewers who have suggested that the coverage is 'rushed', but I think that's more because the book covers soo much material. This is a great reference. The explanations are easy to understand, and I loved the explanation of Threads. Unfortunately, the index leaves a lot to be desired and sometimes makes it hard to find what you are looking for, so you have to rely on the table of contents.

Rating:
Summary: Too many Errors !
Review: This book had me initially very excited. Although a bit confusing in overall structure and flow, it had its moments. The first sign of trouble was when I installed the JDK which I downloaded. The book's instructions on how to name the directories had conflicting examples, happily I worked through that one on intuition. It starts to get unbearable when the examples in the book AND cd have syntax and logical errors. Not being one to waste my money completely, I will continue reading the book (albeit with a critical eye) to grasp some, hopefully not entirely incorrect, concepts. Sorry to say, I am very disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Too many Errors !
Review: Way too many Errors ! Cannot learn from this book. Samples from the CD won't compile either.