Book Review - Java After Hours by Steven Holzner
Category Book Reviews
In most tech language tutorials and how-to articles, you end up getting sample programs and projects that are "formal" or work-related. But sometimes you learn more about a language if you can work on fun stuff. Steven Holzner moves into that territory in the book Java After Hours. There's some stuff in here I'm going to mess around with...
Contents: Introduction; Making Fish Swim in the Multithreaded Aquarium; Slapshot! The Interactive Hockey Game; The Graphicizer Image-Editing and Conversion Tool; Creating Stunning Graphics with Painter; Chatting on the Internet with the Chat Room; Who's There? Logging Access to your Website with WebLogger; Running Any Program via Remote Control with the Robot; Creating a Custom Web Browser in Java: The Browser Project; Typing Across the Internet: The Intercom Project; Getting a Graphical Weather Forecast: The Forecaster Project; Index
I'll admit that I have to give high marks to any book that mixes Java and my favorite sport... hockey! :)
Seriously, Holzner does some interesting things that make this book stand out. By using projects and examples that are more personal and "fun" in nature, it's much more likely that the reader will become absorbed in the material and pick up the particular concepts almost without trying. He also uses projects that are graphical in nature instead of relying on cold, dry server-based routines that just print some words on the screen. It's one thing to learn about multithreading by trying to create "processes" that can run concurrently. It's a whole different learning experience when the threads are fish in an aquarium, and you can truly watch the threads run and interact. This is something you don't see often in most books today. And when you get done with each chapter, you actually have something visible you can look back at and enjoy.
This isn't a book to get if you are looking to learn Java from the ground up. There's no "from A to Z" progression through the language. But if you've already learned Java and are looking to learn some new techniques and concepts, this is an excellent "next step" to take in your Java journey...
In most tech language tutorials and how-to articles, you end up getting sample programs and projects that are "formal" or work-related. But sometimes you learn more about a language if you can work on fun stuff. Steven Holzner moves into that territory in the book Java After Hours. There's some stuff in here I'm going to mess around with...
Contents: Introduction; Making Fish Swim in the Multithreaded Aquarium; Slapshot! The Interactive Hockey Game; The Graphicizer Image-Editing and Conversion Tool; Creating Stunning Graphics with Painter; Chatting on the Internet with the Chat Room; Who's There? Logging Access to your Website with WebLogger; Running Any Program via Remote Control with the Robot; Creating a Custom Web Browser in Java: The Browser Project; Typing Across the Internet: The Intercom Project; Getting a Graphical Weather Forecast: The Forecaster Project; Index
I'll admit that I have to give high marks to any book that mixes Java and my favorite sport... hockey! :)
Seriously, Holzner does some interesting things that make this book stand out. By using projects and examples that are more personal and "fun" in nature, it's much more likely that the reader will become absorbed in the material and pick up the particular concepts almost without trying. He also uses projects that are graphical in nature instead of relying on cold, dry server-based routines that just print some words on the screen. It's one thing to learn about multithreading by trying to create "processes" that can run concurrently. It's a whole different learning experience when the threads are fish in an aquarium, and you can truly watch the threads run and interact. This is something you don't see often in most books today. And when you get done with each chapter, you actually have something visible you can look back at and enjoy.
This isn't a book to get if you are looking to learn Java from the ground up. There's no "from A to Z" progression through the language. But if you've already learned Java and are looking to learn some new techniques and concepts, this is an excellent "next step" to take in your Java journey...
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Comments
I discovered some things that I didn't know before - for example, that you can embed Internet Explorer in your Java apps via SWT! Previously I could only do this with VB and Delphi. And capturing the screen is possible via the Robot class. I thought Java couldn't interact with the OS this way.
Steven Holzner should write books on other programming languages the way he did Java After Hours. The only other book that is this much fun was Magnus Lie Hetland's Practical Python. My hat's off to both these writers for their great work.
Posted by Kok Koon Leong At 20:51:31 On 25/09/2005 | - Website - |