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Java Precisely, 2nd Edition

by Peter Sestoft

4.17 · Rating Details · 24 Ratings · 2 Reviews

This concise guide to the Java programming language, version 5.0, offers a quick reference for the reader who wants to know the language in greater detail than that provided by the standard text or language reference book. It presents the entire Java programming language and essential parts of the class libraries -- the collection classes and the input-output classes.The s ...more

Paperback, 168 pages

Published June 28th 2005 by The MIT Press (first published 2005)

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Mar 30, 2009 G. Branden rated it liked it

Recommends it for: experienced programmers who need to start learning Java quickly

After paying little attention to Java for about 10 years, I twigged that it might be prudent to catch up on what's been going on in this language.

The ideal audience for this book is a programmer with experience in at least two languages--preferably one of them C-like, one of them designed with object-orientation in mind, and if those are both the same language (e.g., C++, Objective-C, or C#), then the second language should be just about anything else, so that one's mind is accustomed to thinkin After paying little attention to Java for about 10 years, I twigged that it might be prudent to catch up on what's been going on in this language.

The ideal audience for this book is a programmer with experience in at least two languages--preferably one of them C-like, one of them designed with object-orientation in mind, and if those are both the same language (e.g., C++, Objective-C, or C#), then the second language should be just about anything else, so that one's mind is accustomed to thinking about programming problems abstractly, and not in the concrete syntax of a particular language.

I am such a member of its audience, and since I desired to know quickly what's been going on in Java lately (i.e., the large additions to the language in Java "5.0", formerly known as 1.5), Sestoft's approach was nearly perfect.

Brief books on modern programming languages fill a crucial niche in the literature; witness the fact that the bibles for each of C++ (Stroustrup), C# 3.0 (Hejlsberg, Torgersen, Wiltamuth, Golde), and Java (Arnold, Gosling, Holmes) each weigh in at a thousand pages to a first approximation.

Sestoft's approach, from which he deviates on a few occasions when the material or space considerations seem to demand it, is to present language features on the left-hand pages and corresponding examples on the right. This technique mostly seems to work. To make the most of the small page budget I presume he set for himself, much material is re-used. That is, to understand the classes in example 96, you will have to refer back to their definitions in example 27. There are some forward references between examples, but most are backward, thankfully.

However, I cannot give this title a higher rating because despite its brevity, it drags a bit in a way that, say, David Beazley's Python Essential Reference (the chapters before the API reference) does not.

Some of this may be due to the nature of the material. If one is reading cover to cover, Java Precisely is about 142 pages, of which a little over thirty are on generics and the standard Collections. On the other hand, this may be my own failing as, being a systems-level guy in Unix land for most of my professional career, I've never had to deal with generics much before. Back on the gripping hand, anyone with exposure to a bit of data structures and algorithms material (linked lists, binary trees, etc.) and modern scripting language features like associative arrays (AWK, Perl, Bash 4.0) or dictionaries (Python) is not going to flabbergasted by what's here. (Update: Perhaps I should have been flabbergasted--see Terran's comment on this review.) Java's generics are, syntactically, closely modeled on C++'s, which may not have been the best decision. (Having come to C++ from C, I find just about every single one of the former's syntactical innovations to have been a bad one. Objective-C seems cleaner.)

Anyway, this is a review of Peter Sestoft's Java book, not Java itself. Nevertheless, the burden is on the author to make the material compelling, and in that endeavor I feel he succeeded most, but not all, of the time. ...more

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Oct 19, 2011 Lewis Cawthorne rated it really liked it

Ahdn't seen Java much in a while. Was a fine quick review. I wouldn't recommend it for much else though.

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