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Book review: Lemay's latest "Java 1.1" title fails to deliver

<em>Laura Lemay's Java 1.1 Interactive Course</em> is little more than a reprint of an out-of-date JDK 1.0.2 title -- and hardly interactive

By Laurence Vanhelsuw&eacute;, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/97

Last year I approached a U.K. publisher with a proposal to write a book on Java. The publisher brushed my proposal aside, stating that his market research indicated that a flood of Java books was on its way and that he didn't want to compete in any bloody topic stampedes.

I privately thought he was joking when he said more than 100 Java titles were on their way, but he turned out to be serious (and apparently understated the number of Java books to be published, which now dwarfs the 100-title mark): Publishing Java books is big business and everyone is pushing and shoving (kicking and stabbing?) to get their titles onto bookstores' finite shelf space.

Unfortunately, the smell of money makes many people behave inappropriately, and so some publishers have started cutting (and pasting) corners -- or in this case, hundreds of pages. Some restrict themselves to using a small pair of scissors, others go for the chain saw.

This article was supposed to be a book review, but instead, my dislike of dishonesty -- and my sense of civic duty -- made me morph it into a short open letter to the Java book-publishing industry as a whole, and one publishing house in particular.

Interactive? Java 1.1? Hardly!

Recently Waite Group Press sent me a review copy of a brand new title, Laura Lemay's Java 1.1 Interactive Course (co-written by Charles Perkins, Michael Morrison, Daniel Groner; ISBN 1-57169-0832; 9.99)

Let's analyze that title for a second, in particular the "Java 1.1 Interactive Course" part. Version 1.1 of the JDK is, as we all know by now, a much more mature animal than JDK 1.0.2. Indeed, JDK 1.1 has twice as many classes. This fact alone should warrant a second Java book flood. Waite Group Press's book looks to be one of the first in this second, JDK 1.1, wave. Or is it?

A bit of inspection revealed that Laura Lemay's Java 1.1 Interactive Course is not truly a new book, at least in terms of its content. Rather, aside from a few new chapters, this "Java 1.1 Interactive Course" is a well-camouflaged, barely edited remold of the best-seller Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days (also by Lemay and Perkins) -- a book published more than a year ago by Sams Publishing, when JDK 1.1 was still on the drawing boards.

This disturbing fact means:

1. The "new" book deals almost entirely with Java 1.0.2, not Java 1.1. (Chapters 1-21 out of 25 are almost exact copies of the older book; one section even plainly states that the current version of the JDK is 1.0.2!)
2. The "new" book is no more interactive than its predecessor. (In other words, it is not interactive at all.)

Pulp fiction

To inflate the page count from an honest 527 pages in Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days to a bloated 1,194 pages for Laura Lemay's Java 1.1 Interactive Course, Waite Group Press added 433 pages(!) of appendices, of which 370 are devoted to a reference of the Java core packages -- the 1.0.2 core packages. (I don't need to remind readers that many computer book classics made it big with fewer than 370 pages total.) Another appendix (taken, like the bulk of the book, verbatim from its predecessor) depicts class hierarchy diagrams for the core packages. Again, these are 1.0.2 diagrams, not 1.1 diagrams.

 

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