Java Magazine, Jan/Feb 2016

ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE JANUARY FEBRUARY 2016 12 java books Horstmann first explains how Java implements object orientation the choices and trade offs it makes and how those afect the way the language is written and used today In these explanations and many others Horstmann relies on his long experience with the language Using his background he frequently explains how certain features are based in Javas early history and how the needs of the time informed the reasoning for various design choices This kind of full detailed information makes it much easier to understand subtle aspects of the language and use them as intended Note that if this much detail is more information than youre looking for in a language tutorial Horstmann has an abridged version Core Java for the Impatient which weighs in at just over 500 pages I reviewed this book in the May June 2015 issue I am a big fan of detailed language tutorials that can serve as definitive references once Ive mastered the basics No other book on Java better fits this mandate than Core Java This has been true for at least the last 10 years possibly longer If you feel that the advent of Java 8 suggests its time to update your language tutorial and reference then this is the book to get without any doubt at all MURACHS BEGINNING JAVA WITH NETBEANS By Joel Murach and Michael Urban Mike Murach Associates All Murach books including this title use a unique approach to instruction They deliver a radical implementation of the notion that the best way to learn a new technology is to use it So rather than offering extensive tutorials that give you the full background information as in the previously reviewed title Murach books provide you only the material needed to master coding the immediate next step These steps are typically presented in two page chunks the left page explaining the topic the right page presenting the implementation in code with accompanying notes about the code itself Turn the page and you start a new two page chunk Needless to say these short lessons build on each other so that after a chapter of them youve done a fair amount of coding and have a working familiarity with the chapters theme This is an entirely hands on pragmatic approach that works as follows when explaining for example how to use arrays in Java The topic comprises these two page lessons how to create an array how to assign values to an array how to use loops with arrays how to use enhanced for loops with arrays how to work with two dimensional arrays how to use the Array class how to copy and compare arrays Eighteen pages and youre good to go The benefit of this approach is obvious and it makes the Murach books very attractive for teachers as well as for students who just want to get up and running quickly The books also work as reference volumes As can be seen from the previous list of topics they can double as collections of useful albeit elementary recipes Notice the consistent use of How to do x as the template for each lesson This hands on design also means that its considerably easier to jump around and pick up the bits of knowledge you might need for solving a specific problem without needing to learn the entire language This approach works particularly well in Murachs books on HTML5 and CSS It also works with languages but not quite as well because language features rarely can be studied in complete isolation While this volume is an introduction to the language I feel that intermediate topics are given exposure that is too short For example in this volume lambdas get only eight pages of coverage which is plainly insufficient To its credit though the book correctly identifies drawbacks of lambdas which are rarely mentioned in other treatments lambdas are difficult to debug difficult to understand in a stack trace and for those unfamiliar with them difficult to understand in code This is not an introduction to programming with NetBeans rather its a tutorial on Java that incidentally uses NetBeans For teachers of Java boot camps or quick language intensives and for developers who need to get up and running quickly this tutorial is the one to use Andrew Binstock