Mastering JSF Book Question - Examples

[Gregg Bolinger]

What type of examples do you provide in your book? Do you go through an entire web application from start to finish? Or do you just hit and miss throughout the book and provide a download of the examples?
Personally, I love books who teach you a technology by building a working app by the end of the book. Unfortunatly too many authors feel is it more important to talk endlessly about the technology while providing no real examples.
So what's up?

[Bill Dudney]

Well I hope the book is not filled with endless drivel
The book talks a lot about the technology with small focused examples until chapter 10 where everything is put together into a semi-real world example on-line payment example. If you watch my blog in the next couple of days I hope to announce the availability of the source for the book. So you can see for your self.
My philosophy is that if you try to build too much of an application the details of the technology will get lost in the babble about the application being built. If you don't provide enough 'real world' context then its mindless drivel for the sake of the technology. Either extreme, in my opinion, is not good. Instead this book tries to walk the line between the two so that there is enough 'real world' feel to make the concept concrete but not so much that the lesson is lost in the problem being solved.
I hope that answers your question. For more examples of my writing style you can check out the sample chapters for the J2EE AntiPatterns book and/or the Jakarta Pitfalls book (search Google for the links, sorry I don't have them handy any more). You can see a sample chapter of my latest book Eclipse Live as well.
Hope this helps!

[Gregg Bolinger]

Thanks Bill. That takes care of it pretty much. I see your point about the right mixture. But what about the examples you do provide. Are they complete? Or are they similar to most other books where you have code something like...

public class bla
{
   public void someMethod()
   {
      SomeCustomClass c = new SomeCustomClass();
   }
   ...
}

And then not provide the source for SomeCustomClass and especially the ... which implies "More code goes here, but I won't take the time to show it to you."
A lot of Authors do this, and when I am going through the book trying to get things to work, they don't. And then the other part of that nightmare is when you do go to download the sourcecode from a website for the examples, it's full of techniques and practices that were never discussed in the book. So it's like the book shows 1 way to do it, but the example source code shows the best way to do it.
The reason I ask is because these things are important to me in the way that I learn. So if I decide to buy your book, I want to know what I should expect is respect to that.
Thanks.

[Bill Dudney]

Hi Greg,
Well some of the listings in the book have elided code (...) but as far as I know and remember the elided code was removed for page count reasons and the full code is actually in the download. And if there is anything important in the ... it is discussed elsewhere. I tried very hard to not bamboozle anyone with lots of discussion and little substance. Instead the book focuses on practical issues. If the ... is there its because the other code is not needed to make the point (at least I hope so).

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Bill Dudney:
Hi Greg,
Well some of the listings in the book have elided code (...) but as far as I know and remember the elided code was removed for page count reasons and the full code is actually in the download. And if there is anything important in the ... it is discussed elsewhere. I tried very hard to not bamboozle anyone with lots of discussion and little substance. Instead the book focuses on practical issues. If the ... is there its because the other code is not needed to make the point (at least I hope so).

Great, thanks for the info Bill.