ChatGPT for Java by Bruce Hopkins

“ChatGPT for Java” is a great way to learn about using ChatGPT in general and accessing Java APIs. It's a relatively short book (225 pages), but the pages are narrower than your traditional tech book. This is great for carrying the book around with you. It's not so great for reading code or looking at tables. I felt like there was  a lot of wasted space in the tables and the description column would be 4-5 words long. There was alos 2.5 pages of a bulleted list that I was wondering why it wasn't two columns. None of this takes away from the content of course.

Early on the book explains how prompts work with a great example. The author compares to regular expressions. I do have to comment re page 6's “I'm thoroughly convinced that every programmer somewhere in their lifetime has met *some guy* who happens to be an expert in writing regular expressions. That's me! Minus the guy part. I did enjoy why LLM and regular expressions are different.

The vocabulary section was great showing that models and tokens are in Java vs in LLMs. I appreciated the samples of good Dall-E prompts including specifying what should be in the foreground. And I loved “Crook's bank” to ensure it doesn't collide with a real back name. I should hope not!

The Java code was good although I was a little puzzled why chapter 2's example didn't use a try with resources (later chapters did). Also text blocks (multiline string) were used at the end but not consistently. There was good use of the builder pattern. The reference tables were good other than the narrowness.

I give this book 8 out of 10 horseshoes.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review.