Hardcore Java 197
| Hardcore Java | |
| author | Robert Simmons, Jr. |
| pages | 400 |
| publisher | O'Reilly |
| rating | Experts: 4/10; Novices: 6/10 |
| reviewer | Alex Garrett |
| ISBN | 0596005687 |
| summary | The path to Java guru-hood |
The two fatal flaws with this book are that it suffers from a lack of cohesion and focus on its audience and that it doesn't present anything new. That the book doesn't present anything new isn't bad if its goal is to summarize, clarify, and educate the novice. But this book doesn't even work for novices because the author has misidentified his audience. At times he writes for the intermediate programmer, at other times he writes for beginners. The confusion over the audience causes the book to leave novices and experts unsatisfied in equal parts.
Detailed Review
Simmons goal is to write a book that helps "transform a [Java] developer from the intermediate level to a true guru." It is his contention that there is a distinct lack of books that target the intermediate to advanced programmer -- his shining exception is the book Secrets of the C++ Masters by Jeff Alger. While I tend to agree with his assessment, I think that he fails for the following reasons: he doesn't stay true to the audience he has chosen and he doesn't say anything particularly new about the topics he covers.
Rather than provide a review of the book as a whole, I'm going to focus on a few chapters and describe what I thought worked and what I thought didn't work. I chose chapters where I thought the author really had an opportunity to distinguish this book from other similar books. At the end of the chapter reviews I provide an overview of the book.
Chapter 1: Java in Review
In this chapter the author sets the stage for the following chapters by providing an overview of the Java concepts that the reader is expected to be familiar with.
The Good:
Assertions are one of the things that a good software engineer should understand and use. It shows good judgement on the author's part to put them at the beginning of the book so the reader can benefit from the author's impressions.
I also found his discussion of initialization to be insightful and interesting. I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of the subject but I was surprised to learn that a field can be initialized by what amounts to an inline method. The author cautions that this technique shouldn't be used often, but he gives a compelling example of when it can be used. It's definitely a trick I'm going to keep in my toolkit.
The Bad:
The first problem is that none of the material in this chapter is necessary for understanding the other parts of the book. Most of it could be reduced to footnotes or sidebars if the author felt it necessary to clarify subsequent topics, but to spend time explaining the importance of the default clause in a conditional is a waste of the reader's time. There's an old saying, "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand." The author of a technical book needs to make a significant effort to involve the reader. If involving the reader isn't possible for some reason, the author should, at the very least, show the reader rather than simply enumerating principles divorced from a learning context. Simmons should show us how to use assertions by using them. He does a great job of this with his ubiquitious use of final. I'm less certain of how well he does with his other core concepts. I could go back to the book and look it up, but if I need to do that, it means he's already failed.
The other problem with this chapter is that the author assumes the stance that the reader is a C++ programmer approaching Java. He asserts, "To understand the advanced concepts of the Java language, there are a few core concepts that you must have firmly in mind. Without these concepts, much of this book will not make a lot of sense. The concepts of pointers in Java, its class hierarchy, and RTTI (runtime type identification) are three of the most important on this list." This list might be important for a C or C++ programmer moving to Java (which is a position I'll hazard a guess that the author found himself) but it's marginally useful for anyone else. Allow me to summarize: Java has no pointers, all objects inherit from java.lang.Object, and you can interrogate an object to determine its type at runtime. 'Nuff said.
Unfortunately, this is a theme that runs throughout the book. The author seems to assume that his audience has a C++ background and he either differentiates between the things that Java has that C++ doesn't (e.g., pointers) or he introduces bits from his C++ background that are also in Java (e.g., the ternary operator). The reason for this, I believe, is that the author has failed to separate himself sufficiently from his audience. That's to say, he's writing the book that he would have liked to have read when he was starting his Java career. This isn't a bad thing if you're sufficiently like Robert Simmons, Jr. to warrant that kind of advice, but if you're not, his exposition is going to be hit or miss.
Chapter 5: Exceptional Code
This chapter covers the use and misuse of exceptions in Java. It provides a summary of the different types of exceptions and provides some guidelines for good coding practices.
The Good:
Exceptions are an important part of Java and are misunderstood by a fair chunk of Java developers. The author recognizes this and attempts to provide an introduction to exceptions and show some of the common exception anti-idioms. His discussion on the necessity of the atomicity of transactions was valuable and clear. He shows what happens in the rare instances when a transaction fails midstream and isn't rolled back. He then provides good advice on how to write code to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
The Bad:
This is a short chapter and that's unfortunate because the topic of exceptions is rich and worth much investigation. This chapter provided an excellent opportunity for Simmons to display some virtuosity and say something significant about the subject. If nothing else, he could have elaborated on the relative merits of checked exceptions vs. unchecked exceptions; a topic that has been the subject of Holy Wars in the Java/C# community. Unfortunately, all he really mustered was an, "unchecked exceptions are Java's way of not cluttering up your code with too many 'throws' clauses." (paraphrased, but see the end of section 5.1.1)
The author seems to have some good intuitions around the use and misuse of exceptions, but rather than clearly delineating the issues and sharing his insight with the reader, he sets up a couple of toy examples that show the syntax of exception handling and waffles around the issue of when to use checked exceptions and when to use unchecked exceptions. There is little enough spoken about exception handling that this might be sufficient if Joshua Bloch hadn't already provided a solid grounding in exceptions with Effective Java. But since he has, I had hoped for some new insights, which Simmons failed to provide.
Chapters 9 & 10: Practical Reflection and Proxies
These chapters provide an introduction to Java's capabilities for introspection of types and objects, as well as describing the new JDK 1.4 DynamicProxy class. Simmons also gives some examples of how to write proxies--dynamic and static.
The Good:
In choosing to cover Java's introspection facilities, the author demonstrates that he recognizes the importance of metaprogramming as a qualification of Java expertise. It's on par with things like writing classloaders or grokking bytecode and it separates the gurus from the merely competent. If nothing else, it gives Java programmers the opportunity to do the things that smug lisp weenies are always nattering on about.
The author gives a good overview of how reflection works in Java as well as providing some examples. He also distinguishes between static proxies (like the Proxy pattern in Design Patterns) and the nifty dynamic proxy part of JDK 1.4 and shows how to use these proxies and provides some demonstrations of how they can be used.
The Bad:
As with much of the book, the examples aren't particularly compelling and Simmons doesn't take the opportunity to take the reader to the next level and show him some sweet metaprogramming. Reflection and proxies aren't complicated conceptually, and the syntax is fairly straightforward. He could have gotten the implementation details out of the way and then provided examples from the field. The JMock guys are doing some nice work in generating mock objects for unit testing with dynamic proxy and the Nanning guys have a nice aspect-oriented programming framework that uses reflection and proxies. This is the kind of work that's being done with metaprogramming and confining the discussion to toy examples is discouraging.
Overall:
The Good:
The author has a good conversational style and seems like the kind of guy that you'd enjoy working with--friendly, knowledgable, and genuinely enthusiastic about his subject. The book has plenty of interesting material. The use of final is a great way of turning logic errors into compiler errors. A knowledge of metaprogramming is becoming more important every day, and bringing metaprogramming to test-driven development is an idea with considerable merit.
Someone new to Java could use this book as a sampler of some important ideas in the practice of Java programming and explore the topics in greater depth at a later point.
The Bad:
This book suffers because the author identified his audience and stated his goal and then didn't follow the path he laid out. As a result, the author winds up disappointing all readers. The novice will find that the author glosses over topics that are clearly over their heads, while the expert will be bored by the level of detail that the author devotes to relatively simple topics.
Additionally, the examples are so simple that a newcomer to Java will not have trouble following them, but someone who has used Java for more than half-a-dozen months will find them uninteresting and unchallenging. The author should have taken the opportunity to really explore the space.
Conclusion:
While this book covered some interesting and high level java topics, it covered them shallowly and its content was presented inconsistently to readers of varying levels of expertise. The author needed to stick with his audience, choose topics that fit well together, and challenge the reader. That said, I don't lay the blame entirely on the author. His editor should have made the book tighter, more compelling, and more focused on its central thesis: helping intermediate Java programmers become expert Java programmers. The technical reviewers, who are presumably experts, should have provided the feedback that Simmons needed to raise the bar.
The book would be more appropriately titled, Robert Simmons, Jr. Shares Some Cool Things from Projects He Has Worked On. I think the best thing for this book would have been for the author to cull each chapter down to one quarter of its existing size and then publish them separately as magazine articles.
Alternate Sources:
The Java Programming Language, 3ed and Effective Java together cover nearly everything in this book in much greater detail and with better authority. Ken Arnold and James Gosling are two of three authors for the first book, and Joshua Bloch, author of the java.util.Collections classes is the author of the second. If you've mastered the material in these two books, you're an expert, full stop. Unfortunately, these books don't really cover reflection and proxies. If you're an intermediate java programmer and you want a good overview of proxies and metaprogramming in Java, I recommend the source code for Nanning, a lightweight aspect-oriented programming framework for Java.
Alex Garrett is a contract programmer who mostly works with Java. For a while, he was the acquisitions editor for Manning Publications, which inclines him to be a smug publishing weenie. You can purchase Hardcore Java from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Hardcore (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hardcore (Score:4, Funny)
I've seen this before (Score:5, Funny)
Once computers become easy to use and fast, we won't need to resort to java.
By that I mean coffee.
Re:I've seen this before (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh. Something Janet Jackson said a couple of years ago twisted my perception of what this ad was about. To those who don't get the reference, consider yourself lucky, and don't search for Janet Jackson coffee.
This? (Score:2, Funny)
Thanks (Score:2)
The author has some articles on nested classes... (Score:5, Informative)
These excerpts are pretty good - he talks thru some scoping issues that can be tricky. OuterClass.this.foo and all that sort of thing.
Re:The author has some articles on nested classes. (Score:3, Insightful)
First he claims that anonymous inner classes are not 'mainstream Java syntax'. Huh? He's got a fairly awkward definition of mainstream if that's the case.
Second he rejects anonymous inner classes for GUI event handling, instead recommending making the the containing class implement XXXListener. I'll accept that they're two competing idioms, but his only argument is that his way is
Re:The author has some articles on nested classes. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hm, maybe. I don't know. They look cluttered to me, especially in a language where blocks aren't the done thing. In Ruby, it's common to see blocks being invoked:
but to see an anonymous inner class created in Java looks sort-of-blockish-but-not-really.
> keep the event handling code
> close to the control code.
I don't know. Almost every time I make an anonymous inner class for a JButton I end up extracting it to a nested class so I can al
Re:The author has some articles on nested classes. (Score:2)
Nonono (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nonono (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nonono (Score:4, Funny)
Invent [m-w.com]: to produce (as something useful) for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment
While many
Why would you pay for it anyways? (Score:4, Informative)
Mono [go-mono.com] is free and open source. So is DotGNU [dotgnu.org]. Rotor [microsoft.com] is made by MS themselves, free and "shared source". And the Microsoft Official .Net SDK [microsoft.com] is free as in beer as well, and free to distribute with any programs you make with it.
With all these free implementations, and Lots of [icsharpcode.net] free Open Source [monodevelop.com] IDEs out there for it, implying that C# development costs money is pretty much the dumbest argument you can make against it.
Re:Why would you pay for it anyways? (Score:1)
Which IDE is the best? Does it have a compiler? If it is as easy to build forms in as
Re:Why would you pay for it anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
I like C#, don't get me wrong. But until Mono stabilizes (some areas have, yes, but much work is left) it's going to
Re:Why would you pay for it anyways? (Score:2)
that that is what matters. ANSI c was cross platform, too. fine if you don't need a GUI.
and, apart from technical details, there is the small matter of trusting the owner of this language - the company called microsoft - to keep it "open and free". HA HA HA. sigh.
as soon as it poses any kind of business problem for MS, it's dead. c# development will not cost you money _right now_. but it will
Re:Nonono (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nonono (Score:2)
Hardcore? (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't the word, or phrase originate from porn? Or was it in use before that? It certanly pre-dates assembly language.
Re:Hardcore? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said, hardcore java is not an impossibility, since it's based on context.
Re:Hardcore? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardcore? (Score:2)
Carmina Burana [wikipedia.org] comes pretty close.
Re:Hardcore? (Score:3, Informative)
...it seems [etymonline.com] that the word dates back to at least 1951, with its application to porn not coming until the 1970's. The pornography use definitely predates references to hardcore music, though.
Hardcore Quiche (Score:2)
Legend has it the Seymour Cray actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Needless to say, Seymour Cray is a Real Programmer.
Assuming that "Real Men" and "Hardcore" are synonymous, and given that Java falls firmly in to the Quiche Eating category, can you really say you can have Hardcore Quiche?
What's next: "AOL for Powerusers"?
Re:Hardcore Quiche (Score:2, Interesting)
Cray was the prototype of the Real Programmer. (Score:2)
Re:Hardcore? (Score:2)
How prescient!
Re:Hardcore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hardcore? (Score:3, Informative)
I've heard it used in certain physics scattering models to refer to atoms with a hard core. Ie, scattering off of something with a 'soft' outer shell and a harder core. Rutherford may have used this term first w/ his gold foil experiment that determined the hard core nature of the atomic nucleus.
Also used in some basic solid-state physics transort equations, like the Drude model. But
Re:Hardcore? (Score:2)
Here in the UK, "hardcore" originates in the construction industry where it refers to stones or rocks used as one of the foundation layers for roads and the like.
I used to know this guy with buck teeth and a mullet and a bottle-opener style guitar who played something he called "hardcore" too.
Download ??? (Score:5, Funny)
Another quibble (Score:4, Funny)
No, hardcore is running another car into the ditch and killing the driver because they changed lanes without signalling.
Or showing off your giant swastika tattoo to a black panthers meeting.
Hardcore is doing coke off the blade of a knife while you make some chickenhead toss your salad as you cruise the strip in your dropped down caddy.
That's hardcore, motherfucker.
It has nothing to do with Java whatsoever.
tsk tsk moderators. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Links and thoughts.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The two books that he recomended look good on Amazon (they both reviewed well). I find it interesting the both of the books are from the same publisher. (note that I am not a amazon partner) The Java(TM) Programming Language (3rd Edition) [amazon.com]
Effective Java Programming Language Guide [amazon.com]
Nanning [codehaus.org]
Re:Links and thoughts.. (Score:2)
Concerning the editor, it really doesn't matter. Those books are good because they are from the authors of Java (and maybe because Sun has some good reviewers).
Regards,
David
Re:Links and thoughts.. (Score:2)
Even t
Re:Links and thoughts.. (Score:2, Funny)
What is this anything thing of which you speak? Sounds like Dr. Suess:
It's the anything thing
this thing that I bring.
Use it for surfing
use it to sing.
Re:Links and thoughts.. (Score:1)
He didn't write "read", he wrote "mastered". There's a big difference. Since I haven't read the books, I can't comment on whether this is true, but in any case it's much different from what you're responding to.
Re:Links and thoughts.. (Score:2)
That's only because the current crop of programming languages are so complex. Browsing my bookshelf got seven books on C++. Why? The language requires lots of details, C++ has a decent size library, and overall is rather complex.
Then I scan my shelf for books on C and I only find one: the K&R book, 2nd edition. It's the only book
Pretty much sums it up (Score:5, Funny)
OK, a lot of tech books lack focus when trying to cover a lot of new material.
it doesn't present anything new.
oh.
--Tsiangkun
Hardcore Java? (Score:4, Funny)
Hardcore geekery... heh heh (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now. The scene: A dark alley, after dusk. A geek wearing scotch-taped glasses and with a Zaurus in his pocket confronts a group of large, scary men.
Geek: "I'm hardcore, man! I implemented a fully-fledged object oriented system in six kilobytes of code! I even talked to a girl once!"
Thug 1: "Let's beat Professor Einstein here up."
Geek: "You can't touch me, knave! I'm hardcore!"
(the beating commences...)
Geek: "Ow! OWWW! Linus protect meeeee!"
Re:Hardcore geekery... heh heh (Score:2)
A Quibble with your Quibble (Score:5, Insightful)
Harcore Java to me means writing Class Loaders or Security Managers, bypassing encapsulation or field and method visibility with reflection, choosing the right garbage collector for high performance server-side applications, dissecting the binary class file format, creating post-compilation class "enhancers" like JDO uses, etc.
These are things that are beyond your typical Java novice, and I would expect some mention of some of these level of topics in any java book labeled "hardcore".
So far from ignoring the title, if this book is more for novices than experts, I'd say the title might be misleading. But if I ignore the first few sentences of your review I might find it less biased and more useful.
Hardcore? Or dumb? (Score:4, Insightful)
bypassing encapsulation or field and method visibility with reflection
this:
dissecting the binary class file format
or this:
creating post-compilation class "enhancers" like JDO uses
Using the reflection libraries to get around visibility means you're just begging for a maintenance headache in the future.
Dissecting the class file format to see how a particular compiler translated your code can be a useful technique, but you can't depend on the output being the same when you use different compilers on different platforms.
Modifying class files after compilation is also a good way to give yourself a lot of headaches when things go wrong. It becomes very difficult to determine the cause of any problems. If you need to build classes like this, you should either generate Java code and compile that (like most JSP compilers), or use aspect-oriented programming tools like AspectJ [aspectj.org].
Re:Hardcore? Or dumb? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, using assembly means you're just begging for a maintenance headache as well.
It's all in why you're doing what you're doing. For some stuff you might need to get hardcore (oooh, how extreme
When I was writing applets back in the 1.0 days I had to do some crazy hacks to get around Microsoft incompatibilities, or to implement double buffering or transparent widgets. Some of the hacks included changing Sun's source
Re:Hardcore? Or dumb? (Score:2)
"Well... I didn't say they were smart ideas, but hardcore has never meant prudent to me."
Exactly. If you're hacking the formalism of a language and you're a reasonable practitioner of that language, my experience is that you're doing it because of some nasty constraint in the OS, the problem, or for some political reason.
Back in the JDK1.2.2 days, I had to implement an web-based autoupdate system for a Java app that required the ability to update the JDK on the fly, and then restart the
Re:Hardcore? Or dumb? (Score:3, Interesting)
My personal favourite of hard-core java things, though, is replacing default Object class that comes with JDK with your own. It was presented in the best java performance tuning available, and was rather interesting thing to do. Author just added bit more debugging, and overriding things in Object
Re:A Quibble with your Quibble (Score:2)
Java was meant to shield the programmer from the hardcore stuff.
Or of assembler?
I want to read a book titled: Business reporting and web front-ends in Java for ASP programmers. That book will fly off the shelves.
eXtreme titles... bah. (Score:2)
Re:A Quibble with your Quibble (Score:2)
When I read the title of the review, the first thing that came to my mind was "Server-based Java Programming", from Manning editorials.
It's one of those really good books that have been sligthly, but unfortunately misnamed. Although the motivation IS server-side code, and there's enough material covering the topic (data layers, rmi, services, etc), its best material was on class loaders and funky ways of using and abusing them.
It was very good at explaining the implications of lan
Good review! (Score:2)
I'm probably being overly simplistic (I'm very interested in the examples of practical reflection and proxies, two features I've not found a use for yet and also were not on the exam), but that's my view in a nutshell.
No Pointers? (Score:1, Informative)
If Java has no pointers what's going on here:
int[] array, array2;
array = new int[1];
array[0] = 5;
array2 = array;
array2[0] = 12;
System.out.println("" + array[0]);
Re:No Pointers? (Score:2)
Re:No Pointers? (Score:4, Informative)
Then why do you get a NullPointerException
instead of a NullReferenceException, if you
try to access it while it's null?
Re:No Pointers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Pointers? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, pointers without pointer arithmetic, without ability to point to arbitrary locations inside objects, without ability to put arbitrary data to the pointed location.
Handlers are not pointers.
I suggest you read a book about implementing programming languages.
Re:No Pointers? (Score:3, Informative)
The definition of a pointer does NOT require arithmetic, arbitrary pointing, or arbitrary data writing. Dictionary.com defines it as "A variable that holds the address of a core storage location." Java just happens to ensure you can't do these things bec
Re:No Pointers? (Score:5, Informative)
Call it a handle, or a reference. It is superficially like a pointer, as your example demonstrates.
However, it clearly is not a pointer, because you cannot do this:
array2 = array + 1;
You also cannot do this:
array2[1] = 12;
Because it would cause a bounds exception. In C, you can get away with writing outside an array, and you get all the wonderful side effects of that, including random crashes, data corruption, or in the worst possible scenario, no visible bug whatsoever.
And don't even think of trying this in Java:
double[] foo = new double[100];
int[] bar;
bar = (int[])foo;
The above is an example of a pointer typecast as it would be expressed in Java (if it was allowed), but thankfully, the above code is utter nonsense. Anyway, the entities you manipulate in Java are quite assuredly not pointers. They are handles to objects.
Re:No Pointers? (Score:3, Insightful)
If people defined their terms, there would be alot fewer arguments in the world.
According to the Java specification [sun.com], Java references are pointers. What you are saying is that Java does not have C style pointers. There are definitions of "pointer" at different levels of granulairty. Java has pointers if using a more generic definition of "pointer".
Re:Listen, young one... (Score:5, Informative)
No. A pointer is a memory address. A reference is an abstract object referring to another object. It might be implemented as a memory address, or it might not.
I could very well implement references by making them indexes into a table of structs which contain type information as well as pointers to the objects themselves. Thus, the pointer would be extracted from the reference like this:
ptr = ref_table[reference].pointer;
In fact, this would be superior to merely using pointers as references, because it makes it explicit that the reference is not a pointer and doesn't behave like one.
Re:Listen, young one... (Score:2)
reference != pointer (Score:5, Informative)
A reference is not the same thing as a pointer. A pointer is one way to implement a reference, and judging by Java's error messages it's how most implementations have implemented them (it may be required in the spec for all I know).
Then again, pointers aren't even in the original spec for C++, you were just supposed to use references. That never caught on among compiler writers, though.
Re:No Pointers? (Score:3, Informative)
OT: Java performance on AMD64? (Score:2, Interesting)
There should be a decent improvement running in 64-bit mode, both for the VM and the code it's running, or?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oooh. (Score:2)
Two?
Effective Java (Score:5, Interesting)
-----------
WAP software [chiralsoftware.net]
Re:Effective Java (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Effective Java (Score:2)
You should try reading fiction sometime. It's much more pleasant than books on programming languages.
Re:Effective Java (Score:2)
It all depends on what you find pleasurable. I personally get more pleasure expanding my vision, than expanding my imagination (, which is not to say I don't get pleasure expanding the latter, merely moreso the former).
Hardcore Java (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hardcore Java (Score:2)
hardcore! (Score:2)
Aborted.
I perfer my java (Score:1)
Jumbo Shrimp (Score:2, Funny)
Hardcore isn't implementing coroutines in assembly (Score:3)
Hardcore isn't even implementing coroutines portably in 48 lines of Forth, as I did for a control system in the '80s. Anything you can't at least prototype in 48 lines of Forth is probably something you don't understand well enough to do anyway.
No...
Hardcore is implementing coroutines in C using clever tricks with the subroutine calling conventions, and then building a paradigm-beating operating system like UNIX on top of it.
Oh, I gave the punchline away.
MS-DOS Modula 2 (Score:2)
Now, don't get me started on TSRs....
I think it's all this beer they make me drink. ;-)
Now, FORTH,... if only...
Re:Hardcore isn't implementing coroutines in assem (Score:2)
-russ
Things you can do with Java no one talks about.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Things you can do with Java no one talks about. (Score:2)
<looks around> I don't see any slander here.
Why are you so insecure about your language of choice? If it's really all you make it out to be, what does it matter if a few twirps on some message board disparage it? Not to mention you've gotten defensive even before the insults have started flying...
Very, very odd behavior, I think.
What's this "DynamicProxy" class? (Score:2)
Re:What's this "DynamicProxy" class? (Score:2)
Wait, hardcore? (Score:2)
6K, eh? (Score:2)
What about "Hardcore Visual Basic"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Mock me if you will, but there was once a book called Hardcore Visual Basic [mvps.org]. It was one of the few intelligent books written on the subject. I'm not a big VB fan, but I can appreciate how it once was a great RAD tool. I wished all of Microsoft's VB-like documentation looked like this. It was rigorous and concise.
I remember all of the laughs I got when I went around the office asking if anyone had ever heard of a VB book written for C++ programmers. Of course, my smart-ass smirk proba
Not a good book (Score:2)
Some parts that contribute to my bad review:
Oreilly has a good track record for their books, but this one made me think they'll give anyone a book deal
Google finds a pretty damning critique (Score:2)
Google cache [216.239.59.104]
PDF Critique [peter-cockerell.net]
OReilly book page with sample chapter. [oreilly.com]
Nice! (Score:2)
Sweet! I, for one, have been DYING to see Java take it right up its...
What? Not that kind of 'hardcore'? Damn.
Doug
Re:assembly language is for pansies (Score:5, Interesting)
That is like saying hardcore is writing an english novel using only one vowel. There are a lot of novels you couldn't write that way.
Re:assembly language is for pansies (Score:1)
Re:assembly language is for pansies (Score:2)
Re:assembly language is for pansies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:assembly language is for pansies (Score:3, Insightful)
All physical computers are equivalent to finite state machines, due to the fact that their memory is not infinite.
A computer with 64 megs of RAM along with 8 32-bit registers has a total of 536871168 bits of memory. Hence, such a machine can take on a finite number of states, namely: 2^536871168 states.
It's a collossal number of states, but the fact is, all computers with finite memory are finite state machines.
Re:nope. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nope. (Score:2)
Re:Old & Dated.... (Score:1)
Browse a few job sites, and do a search for "Java". I think it's safe to say that Java's not about to disappear for some time yet...