Teach Yourself Jbuilder in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners!
Review: I bought this book in the hope that I could build a few simple applets and get started building programs in Jbuilder. Chapter 8 caught my eye in the bookstore after reading favorable reviews here. Several frustrating hours later, I have yet to get a functioning jbuilder application working at my ISP. I have noticed some serious omissions in this book which suggests it was not written or edited with the latest version of Jbuilder. Chapter 8 fails to mention where I am likely to find the jbuilder class files which must be deployed on the web to successfully run a java applet. ( I learned about the class file location from Borland's FAQ page ) It should have been covered in Chapter 8. While discussing the CODEBASE HTML code, the book does not discuss the command CODEBASE = "." which is the HTML generated by the the most basic applet wizard. When I deploy my applet to my public html account and attempt to run the applet with Netscape's latest browser I get the message "Applet1 can't start class hello.Applet1 not found." Some key information is missing from Chapter 8. Thus, this book has failed me in attempting to construct the most simple application. I think it belongs among all those here today gone tomorrow books that were written with Beta software and never tested or edited by serious technical people. Rushed to the market the book quickly looses relevance.

Rating:
Summary: Throw it in the trash heap
Review: I had the unfortunate experience of making this my first JBuilder book purchase. Its lightweight description of JBuilder's features teaches nothing of insightful value. JBuilders help gives more than this.

An example? For me, the heart of JBuilder is Borland's work on the data access components. The entire chapter on JBuilders data access tops out at 25 pages in a book of 700+ pages. The QueryDataSet gets a **whopping** 3 pages, intermingled with useless code snippets.

I think this book would have been better served if it had concentrated on the more important capabilities of JBuilder. Granted it is an introductory text, but so much so that it is hard to accomplish much worthwhile after reading it.

Rating:
Summary: A bit lacking in depth & Real examples
Review: I like the book overall, but it seems to be very long simply so that it can be a big book, and get that "Bookshelf Cred", simply to sell more books. The pages themselves are printed on very thick paper, which makes the book even bigger than neccessary. It also lacks much info on Java itself, and a Java intro/reference is also needed. The example programs are mainly toy code -- I would like to see a project being developed over the period of the book, to give experience in the whole RAD developement process... All in all, a decent introductory text, but rather cynically overmarketed, as are most Teach Yourself ... in 21 Days books -- I guess you'd expect that from the title. I recommend you buy a more in-depth, more thoroughly written and edited book that wasn't rushed to market, and contains some real meaty examples...

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners!
Review: I like the way the book was written, I am only a beginner in the JBuilder series but was really helpful in making my understand the concepts in step by step basis. Some may not agree but for me I'll keep this in my library!