Review by : Campbell Ritchie
Rating : 9 horseshoes
I would always advise readers to try before they buy; look at the contents and sample pages on Amazon or similar. There you will find you get 1117 pages, 115 more than in my 2005 edition. That's even more of a change when you remember the threading chapter moved to Vol I. That extra space is full of information, in the inimitable Horstmann & Cornell (H&C) style. They teach object‑oriented programming throughout, with good coding style and emphasise correctness. The book has been updated and uses Java7 constructs throughout, even though the odd use of StringTokenizer escaped updating. And GridBagConstraints appears once instead of GBC (see volume I).
This book makes no pretence to comprehensiveness. There is relatively little about
servlets, for example, and no design
patterns; as I said about Vol I, they assume readers know patterns already.
The points for C++ programmers still appear; they are interesting but only of relevance to people coming from C++. Those points are probably important because there are many points where the apparent similarities between the two languages obscure differences.
I found the chapters about security and native methods particularly interesting.
The index is comprehensive. There are suggestions for further reading, e.g. about advanced graphics. When H&C are unhappy about something in the Java™ platform, they say so without hesitation (policytool is criticised on page 833).
The only weakness I perceive is the lack of a proper bibliography, which I believe would enhance this book greatly. There is one place where it looks as if a reference had been forgotten.
Still, H&C has been a favourite of mine for a long time, and remains a favourite.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com