Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Thinking in Java
by Bruce Eckel
List: $39.95

Paperback, 1100 pages
Published by Prentice Hall Computer Books
Publication date: March 1998
ISBN: 0136597238

"Thinking in Java" (or TIJ for short) is a thick 1100 page volume with an original, distinctive cover. It is unique that not only all examples from the book, but the full text of the book is available from the author's website.

I like the idea of cover -- the idea of programming as a kind of craft. Polished wood on the cover looks natural. It's inspired by the "American Art & Crafts Movement" that emphasized the importance of the individual craftsman in the use of modern tools.

The main idea of the book is right -- the programming language should be learned through experimentation with available implementation. Examples are well structured to expose the properties of the language, especially OO features. Such an approach is well suited for teaching. At the same time when examples are designed for experimentation, they fail to reveal typical idioms used in practical programming and this is a drawback of such an approach. To compensate for weaknesses of current examples the author probably can eliminate some water from them and add some examples illustrating idioms and/or provide comments for the examples included with JDK.

TIJ can be considered as one of the first second-generation Java books with a somewhat sober approach to the language. The author does not consider Java as a replacement for C/C++ as it's actually competes with VB and PowerBuilder. The book still contains hype about OO, but on a tolerable level. Some references to design patterns movement have a flavor of proselytizing, but people critical to the patterns movement can easily ignore them. At the same time, the language constructs are explained well, especially OO-related features. Generally the book is focused on high-level staff. JVM and debugging -- the last one is probably the most problematic in adopting Java in large projects (before OO people used to make their own errors; now they tend to inherit them ;-) -- are not discussed at all.

Writing an introductory book on Java is a very tricky task. With each new release of JDK the inflation of the value of already published books is comparable to the inflation of the ruble after the dissolution of the USSR (i.e. more than 100% a year ;-). There are already more than 500 books on Java, and more than 80% of them are introductory. Judging from this standpoint in just three years Java became the 4-th most important computer language after Basic (more than 3000 books), C/C++ (more than 2000 books) and Pascal/Delphi (more than 900 books). There are more books on Java than on Fortran (less than 500), Cobol (less than 500), Lisp (less than 200) -- the languages with more than two decades of history. Java is extremely fashionable. So buyers beware ;-). I use a simple checklist to determine whether a particular introductory programming language book is worth reading:

1. Is the text of the book available electronically or on the CD?

2. Does the author have a personal web-site with an area devoted to the book (if not he probably does not care much about the book)?

3. Does the book have an updated examples and errata available on the WEB (the examples *always* need updating after publishing ;-)?

4. How practical are the examples and how much of the code can be reused ?

5. Is the Donald Knuth article "Structured programming with GOTO" mentioned in a chapter on control structures and short-circuit AND/OR explained in the "if" statement?.

6. Is visibility rules and storage allocation mechanisms (especially difference between static and dynamic allocation) explained clearly using both examples and diagrams ?

7. What books the author recommends ("the friends of my friends ...") ?

Not many books will pass this test, so the choice became much easier. TIJ passes all, but q.4 (examples are designed for experimentation with the language, not for practical use) and q.6 (no diagrams for storage allocation and visibility).

IMHO this book represents a major innovation in publishing -- I would like to call it a parallel publishing. Bruce Eckel has found an extremely interesting solution to make his book different despite a Java introductory books glut -- he published the book on the WEB first. This "Try before you buy" approach has a lot of advantages. As he states in the foreword "it turned out to be the smartest thing I've ever done with a book". The book definitely benefited from comments and suggestions of early readers. Several publishers are now trying this approach (see for example McGraw-Hill betabooks site), but to a more limited extent (final copies of the books are never available from the McGraw-Hill site).

The book was typeset by the author in MS Word 97. That approach always makes the book more up-to-date than a traditional typesetting, and it probably contain less typos than other early 1998 books typeset in a traditional way. All examples that I tested worked. In comparison with other books published in the first quarter of 1998, it contains more recent information. For example, a discussion of the JFC (a.k.a. Swing library).

However, such an approach is not without flaws. The main drawback is that the book lacks diagrams that will clarify concepts (probably partially due to monolithic approach -- MS Word 97 is not very good in working with such long documents). Layout is mostly plain vanilla text with a very few fonts. Important thoughts are not reiterated and were not put in a separate font.

Regrettably, like most other books on Java, examples are all typeset at plain Courier with excessive spacing between the lines. It contributed to the volume of the book. ALGOL-style typesetting of examples would be much better.

First there is a definite advantage that Bruce Eckel is an expert in C++ and has authored four books on C++. So his strongest competitors are the authors who have published books on C++. I read not so many of them and the list below is very limited:

• The main competition is probably "Core Java" by Gary Cornell and Cay S. Horstmann. It is also oriented on serious programmers and like TIJ got almost all 10 in readers reviews at www.amazon.com.  But it does not contain an electronic version of the book  on the CD or on the Net.  So TIJ is better value. I believe both books have merits and, if possible,  "Core Java" should be used with TIJ, as they to certain extent complement each other.
• Michael C. Daconta book "Java for C/C++ programmers".  The latter book does not have a WEB site and is not available electronically, so it cannot compete with TIJ.  In case already it's available I would like just to mention that    the first edition(I do not have the second edition) contains a more detailed comparison between C/C++ and Java and can serve as a supplementary reading.
• "Just Java" by Peter Van der Linden, who is the author of "Expert C Programming". The book is not available electronically. The author seems to be more focused on the lightweight, applet style of Java. I like the style and the reading was really enjoyable. But TIJ provides a much better value.

Among other books that worth buying and reading I would like to mention Java in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (The Java Series) by David Flanagan(see reveiw of by Doug Nickerson in ERCB). Again there is no electronic version of the book available.

Conclusions

On ERCB scale I would like to give the book the following marks (The Originality mark is connected with electronic distribution of the text, low mark on design is connected with lack of diagrams and poor typography.

Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.

I recommend this book for readers proficient in at least one procedural language, but who suffer from the inferiority complex and want to learn of all this modern Java/OO staff ASAP;-). The book is definitely useful for teaching the language.

Recommendations  for the second edition

• Start upgrading now and provide some revised chapters on the WEB based on additional experience gained during the work on "Thinking in C++".
• To compencate for weaknessing of experimental examples swith some water from them and add some examples illustrating idioms and/or comments for JDK examples;
• Polish typesetting skills by taking some advanced course in typesetting with MS Word/MS Publisher;
• Restructure some chapters based on experience with the first edition of the book;
• Do not forget to finish it before year 2000 ;-).

Useful links

Online version of the book competes with other Java e-books and tutorials. See Yahoo!Java or www.developer.com for the most up-to-day list. Developer.com Java Programming Section is a very useful resource for links to programming in Java and and WEB programming (Perl, HTML, etc.). It contains  more documents than I want to list here.  

• Developer.com Java Programming Section -- developer.com is a very useful resource for links to programming in Java and fortunately not limited to Java. the Java programming section contain much more document than I can add here.
• The Java Tutorial  by Mary Campione and Kathy Walrath. The official Sun tutorial. Up-to-date.
• Writing Java(tm) Programs -- a useful list of Java-related documents from Sun, including Java language specification and Java VM specification.
• Java Downloads: (may require registration in the SUN Java Developer Connection which is free)
  • Swing Short Course, Part I --by Magelang Institute(2.17Mb zip format)
  • JavaBeans Short Course --by Magelang Institute (308.5K zip format)
  • Complete Beans Tutorial --by Greg Voss, Sun Microsystems (1.65Mb zip format)
  • JDBC Short Course --by Magelang Institute (6.31Mb zip format)
  • AWT Short Course --by Magelang Institute (1.05Mb zip format)
  • The JavaSoft Java Tutorial download page
• JavaBeans Documentation - Sun site with the beans tutorial.
• Getting Started with VisualAge for Java 1.0 -- by Marc Carrel and John Akerley. These pages contain the final version of an IBM Redbook. December 1997
• IBM Java Education - Introduction to Java Online Course -- the first complete, Internet-based, free course on the fundamentals of Java and Java's important implications for electronic business on the World Wide Web. One-hour, Web-based course on Java uses a combination of video, audio, graphics, and text. A text-based version of the course is also available.
• Rick Baldwin's on-line Java tutorials  Three tutorials including The Advanced Java Programming Tutorial is now available.
  The last tutorial includes topics such as the development of Java Beans, the model-view-controller paradigm, graphics, images, lightweight components, object serialization, and reflection.
• Brewing Java: A Tutorial:   An introduction to the basics of Java programming, by Elliott Rusty Harold.  Covers Java 1.0. A little bit outdated, but can be used as a supplementary material.
• Concurrent Programming Using the Java Language  by Stephen J. Hartley. The material is covered in more detail in the book, Concurrent Programming: The Java Programming Language, published by Oxford University Press in Febr. 1998.
  The book's source code is available from the site.
• Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) Tutorial  by Nelson Yu. Last changes in early 1996. Outdated.
• How to set up and use the JDK (Java Developer's Kit) By Phil Filner, last revised September 6, 1996. Outdated.

• Cooking Beans in the Enterprise Henri Jubin. Fragments of a book from IBM. Very incomplete as of 03/98. 

   

• Shlurrrpp......Java learning Java The Java tutorial for java programming -- the tutorial from India by Vijay Mukhi, Sonal Kotecha and  Shashank Tripathi.

• "Java in a Nutshell" by David Flanagan.-- The second edition is a very good reference and is only $15 (with 25% discount). Each class or interface listing is followed by a listing of the classes, if any, that extend or implement it, the methods that return an object of that type, the methods that are passed an object of that type, and the fields that are declared to be of that type. In this online version, this information is included directly with the class quickref material, where it will hopefully be more useful. The quick reference material also contains three useful indexes: a class index, a method index and a field index. You can browse the quick reference pages from our O'Reilly site, or you can download zip file for viewing locally on your own computer.
  
• Java Network Programming by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Covers Java 1.1. Contains the first chapter and examples from the book His Cafe Au Lait web site at http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/ is a frequently visited Java site.
•  
• Java Secrets site by Elliotte Rusty Harold. The second book of the same author. The idea of showing what is "under the hood" is an attractive one, but it's very difficult to maintain high quality when publishing a book a year, so probably it make sense to wait until the second edition.
  
• O'Reilly Java center -- Worth visiting as web pages for some books contain not only examples, but an example chapter as well.
  
• Graphic Java -- A book about the Java AWT.  The Graphic Java Toolkit (GJT), version 1.1 can now be downloaded from the same site. "While almost every Java book covers the AWT, none...does it so well or provides such good advice on how best to use it." -- Dr. DOB's Journal, March 1997

• Amazon.com Interview with Peter Van der Linden

Last modified: February 28, 2008