Author: David Flanagan
Publisher: O'Reilly, 2004
Pages: 720
ISBN:978-0596006204
Aimed at: Java programmers who are not complete beginners
Rating: 4
Pros: Lots of useful examples
Cons: Lacks full descriptions of the code
Reviewed by: Lucy Black

A useful resource book of examples to show you have things can be achieved.

If you have recently started to learn Java then this book might provide useful as extra material. This is a third edition and so is well over the typos and straightforward bugs in the examples in the first edition. covers Java 1.4 and includes new chapters on the Java Sound API and the New I/O API. The chapters on XML and servlets have been rewritten to cover the latest versions of the specifications and to demonstrate best practices for Java 1.4. There are new and updated examples throughout the book bringing the total to 193 complete, practical examples comprising over 21,900 lines of code.

There are examples of how to handle threads, the GUI, printing, JavaBeans, Java 2D and so on. Also it gives examples of many of the main Java APIs – RMI, JDBC, servlets and so on -  in total 20 distinct client-side and server-side APIs.

Notice that this book doesn’t try to teach you Java – for that you need another book such as David Flanagan's Java in a Nutshell, see side panel, now in its fifth edition.  Rather It is a resource book of examples to show you have things can be achieved. As a programmer who swaps languages often I have found it useful just to look at to remind myself of the general look and feel of Java. A very useful book but only if you are good at getting information out of listings because while there are descriptions of how the programs work they are not extensive.