Meera Subbarao has a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering and seventeen years of software programming experience around the globe, from Bangalore,India to Dubai,United Arab Emirates, to the United States. She has spent the past six years at DataSource, Inc. in Maryland and has been working on J2EE technologies exclusively for the last six years. She is a Sun Certified Java Programmer as well as a Sun Certified Web Component Developer. Meera is also the Team Leader for the Javalobby/dzone book review team.
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| Author(s) | Timothy Fisher |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Sams Publishing |
| PubDate | November 2006 |
| Reviewer | Meera Subbarao |
One Minute Review
Sections
Intent & Audience
Java Phrasebook is a beautiful, well written book containing 100's of phrases, which will help the reader to accomplish common tasks in Java. This book is for intermediate Java developers as well as developers who are new to Java.
The author assumes you have previous knowledge of Java and you are ready to program in Java; don't worry he has included references to various web sites (mostly Sun) throughout the book for additional information you might need.
Relevance of material
Not much to say here; the book covers JDK 5.0 and is not a Java language tutorial or introduction or even a reference to the Java language.
If I ever decide on giving a course in Java, either in a college or some other place, I will definitely use this book as my course material. It covers bits and pieces of almost everything you would need to know to write a basic Java application.
Chapter highlights
1.The Basics chapter contains the phrases that you will need to get you started in Java development which include compiling and running a Java program, and setting the class path.
2.Interacting with the Environment provides phrases that help you interact with the runtime environment like System.getenv, System.getProperty and System.setProperty. The author does caution you that using thes object may lead to platform dependent code, which may not be consistent across all platforms.
3.Manipulating Strings shows you some common tasks involving strings like comparing strings, searching for and retrieving substrings, parsing a comma-separated string etc.
Screen shot of what a phrase looks like:
4.Working with Data Structures covers most commonly used data structure classes like the ArrayList and the HashMap;phrases like resizing an array, iterating, sorting , finding a collection and also converting a Collection to an array.
5.Dates and Times. This chapter covers phrases for three primary classes which are most widely used in most Java programs; java.util.Date, java.sql.Date, and the java.util.Calendar class.
6.Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions. The java.util.regex package in JDK1.4 version and above provides a mechanism for compiling and matching regular expressions in Java. You'll learn how to use regular expression features of Java to find, match, and replace text supported by the java.util.regex API, and presents several working examples to illustrate how the various objects interact.
7.Numbers focuses on the basic numeric Java types, their object wrappers. Finally, the Math class in java.lang is discussed. It contains mathematical functions to complement the operators built into the language. This chapter has phrases for the trigonometric functions, logarithmic functions.
8.Input and Output, java.io package provides for system input and output through data streams, serialization and the file system, and in this chapter, the author shows you how to read and write files, work with zip archives, format your output, and work with the standard operating system streams.
9.Working with Directories and Files, phrases in this chapter will help you work with files and directories in Java.
10.Network Clients, uses the java.net package to cover all the phrases for socket-based programming.
11.Network Servers, covers phrases for creating a Server and accepting a request, returning a response, returning an object, handling multiple clients, and also serving HTTP content.
12.Sending and Receiving Email, covers the topics of sending and receiving email from a Java application.
13.Database Access. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API is a standard SQL database access interface. This API makes it possible to do three things:
- Establish a connection with a database or access any tabular data source
- Send SQL statements
- Process the results
This chapter has phrases to connect to a Database, sending a Query, using a prepared statement, retrieving results of a query, and finally calling a stored procedure via JDBC.
14.Using XML. XML is a text-based markup language that is fast becoming the standard for data interchange on the Web. This chapter covers parsing XML with SAX, with DOM. Using a DTD to verify an XML document, creating an XML Document with DOM, and also transform XML with XSLT.
15.Using Threads.The JVM allows an application to have multiple threads of execution running concurrently. In this chapter, you will learn how to start and stop a Thread, synchronizing Threads and also pausing and listing all threads. There are two ways to create a new thread of execution.One is to declare a class to be a subclass of Thread. The other way to create a thread is to declare a class that implements the Runnable interface. You'll see phrases for creating both types of threads.
16.Dynamic Programming Through Reflection. The Java Reflection API gives Java classes the ability to perform dynamic introspection. In other words, the API reflects the classes, interfaces, and objects in the current JVM. You'll be using the Reflection API if you are writing tools such as debuggers, class browsers etc. This chapter covers phrases, which will help you use the Reflection API.
17.Packaging and Documenting Classes, the last chapter, covers creating a package, using JavaDoc, archiving classes with jar, and running a program from a jar file.
Rating
Personally, I found this book very easy to read, and carry; it fits in my purse.
I do agree with what the author suggests; if your goal is to get a deeper understanding of a specific technology, this is not the book you are looking for.
On the other hand, this book should be very helpful for those who need to brush up some phrases before an Interview or even to those who teach Java courses.
I had seen foreign language phrase books earlier, this was the first technical phrasebook I read, and if you are indeed looking for one, I highly recommend this for Java.
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