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Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive but somewhat redundant
Review: An impressive, 1000 page plus tome. It has four parts, but the first two are the bulk of the book. Part 1 lists each java package. Within a package, it tells of each class and interface and provides examples of how to do often needed tasks. You already need to know java to fully take advantage of this. Part 2 is an alphabetical listing of all classes, from all packages. For each class you can see its ancestors and all members of the class, with calling arguments and return values. Part 3 has miscellaneous topics; most usefully the difference between java 1.3 and 1.4 (the latest), as in the title. Part 4 is basically an index, being a cross reference of classes and interfaces.The sweep of the book is comprehensive and up to date. But of limited use. Part 2, which is half the book, differs in no material way from this URL- .... Sun makes this available on the web as an aid to java programmers. Other websites also publish it. In addition, you can copy the manual and have it available locally on your computer. My mode of programming involves bookmarking the URL and having a browser window dedicated to it during coding. Not just me. In various companies and universities, I've seen others do this. Are you old enough to remember log tables? These were books of logarithms, powers and trigonometric functions. Prior to the advent of pocket calculators, students would have their own copies. They were comprehensive and correct. Now totally redundant. That is what Part 2 reminds me of. Granted, if your computer has no web access, then you need the equivalent of Part 2. But how many programmers today cannot browse? The book needs to go on a diet. The three other parts do have some utility. At least you should be sure of that before purchasing.
Rating: 
Summary: An essential reference
Review: For some time, the Java Developers Almanac version 1.3 has been my constant companion when I taught my courses in Java. With it at my side, I was always able to answer questions of the form, "What class(method) do you use for . . . ?" It is one of that small of number of indispensable references that occupy my special shelf of books that stay within reach of my main workstation.
However, now it has been superceded by this version, the second volume of which covers 45 packages used in GUI development. It is a quick, yet thorough reference to the classes. Each description of a class in part 2 has the name and package it is found in, the inheritance tree describing how it is derived and the prototypes of all data and methods. Part 1 has small segments of code that illustrate the basics of how a class is used. The code examples are organized according to packages, where the packages are listed alphabetically. This makes it very easy to find the basic information about any class and method of the class. There is also a list of newly deprecated members, a complete list of all possible exceptions, a list of the modifications from 1.3 and the default values of the swing UI elements.
This book is rarely more than two feet from my body when I am writing Java and when it gets too far away, I correct the problem very quickly. I included it in my best books of the year list for the online Journal of Object Technology.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Java Reference
Review: I picked this book up a couple months ago and can't imagine how I got along without it before. The first section includes simple examples of common uses of the java packages. I find this extremely useful. There are realms in Java where the intricacies often slip my mind, particularly in java.io, and the small examples of these packages shown in section 1 serve as a perfect reminder of how exactly to accomplish my task. Section 2 is the meat of the book and includes a reference to the classes and their members. This is similar to the online API, but lacking the descriptions for the methods / classes. This is strictly a quick reference of the methods, their arguments, return types and modifiers, and the variables belonging to a class. For a description of every method, use the online API. Personally though, I find this reference quicker to use than the online API when searching for a particular class. It probably comes down to personal preference, though. Sections 3 and 4 I honestly haven't found a need for. The first two sections alone are worth the (relatively) [inexpensive] price of the book. For reference, my qualifications include Sun Java Programmer Certification 1.4 (Passed with an 86%), Graduated Magna Cum Laude from UMass Dartmouth with a Computer Science degree.
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: 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: An impressive achievement
Review: This book condenses the vastness of Java 1.4 GUI classes into a hefty 1000+ pages. It's divided into 4 sections. Part 1 contains examples of usage of the different classes, with a focus on how to accomplish something specific, from creating a JLabel component to playing MIDI audio. Part 2 contains detailed information about the classes themselves, and contains references to code examples from Part 1 to see how the class is used in code. This is essentially the documentation that SUN's website provides, but in my view, it's more condensed and the references to code are a bonus. Part 3 contains topics on the transition of Java from 1.0 to its current incarnation, detailing deprecated classes, new classes, etc. Part 4 is the cross-reference section, where if you know the name of the method, but not the class that contains that method, you can simply look it up. There's much more than just methods, though; subclasses, descendants, fields, and "extended by"'s are also some of the details here. This book is quite an impressive achievement, and I hope to get my hands on Volume 1 sometime soon.
Rating:
Summary: Good for, if you don't have IDE tool.
Review: Volume 1 covers java.beans to org.xml packages useful for server side development.
Volume 2 covers java.applet to javax.swing packages useful for developing GUI application.
This is is a review for Vol. 1.
This book is not for begineers or not for learning A Java.This book is a good reference book
for all the java Packages, Classes and Interface.
Packages is useful when you need an overview of a package or what other related classes are
available in a package.
Classes gives complete detail of the ancestry of the class and a list of every member in the
class.This part is useful when you're already working with a particular class and want quick
reference to all of the members in the class.
It has lots of hands on examples, which are very useful for finishing a particular task like,
reading a file, sending a socket etc. like programmers need some basic routines,while coding. I recommend this book for those, who does professional coding and need to in touch with API.
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