Reviews for Java-NIO

1. It's ok but the examples could be better

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2010

   I was a bit disappointed with the book. Some of the end examples have some comments such as 'WARNING: the above loop is evil' embedded in the code. This hardly inspires confidence.
   
   Other than the examples, the author does a reasonable job of explaining the APIs and as there are not too many books on NIO, it's nice to read something about it.
   
   The thing that really struck me after reading this book and searching the web are some of the troubles developers are having with Java NIO API. There have been quite a few bugs (some of which have been fixed by Sun) and quite a few different ways to achieve the same result. Furthermore, there are frameworks out there to simplify using Java NIO (i.e. Apache MINA).

2. Good

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2006

   The book starts by outlining the main points well.

   It has useful learning examples for each of the subject areas covered which can be read independantly from each other.

3. An good book that opens your eyes to an excellent language

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, May 12th, 2004

   The book is not excellent but the fact
   that it is the only one that opened my eyes
   in this excellent part of Java it is worth the money.
   The book explains the concepts with simple (but not naive)examples. The new features of Java that this book explained
   made me to write an excellent Master Thesis and also to
   make Java to work with an application that had to work
   in Real-Time. I have a Master in Control Engineering
   and also one in Computer Science and I am doing another
   in Biomedical Engineering. That book was the most usefull
   book in all my 9 years of graduate and postgraduate studies.
   And for that it takes 5 stars.

4. Somewhat lightweight and disappointing

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2003

   Information on the new, high-performance I/O classes in Java 1.4 is hard to come by anywhere so this book is welcome for providing some information, at least. It also covers the new character set and regular expression classes which, although seemingly unrelated, came from the same Java Specification Request (#51 if you're interested) and which hardly merit a book by themselves. Nevertheless, the book should be judged on its coverage of NIO, and in my opinion it fails to do this adequately. The main problem, I think, is lack of real world application. Many of the examples are trivial and / or silly (although there is a very amusing one which randomly generates frighteningly realistic marketing speak - "Harness extensible paradigms" or "leverage cross-platform functionalities"). One of the main ideas of NIO is that you're supposed to be able to manage multiple non-blocking data streams with a single thread, rather than using a thread for each incoming connection, and so reducing system resource usage as well as making your server programs more responsive. The example that Hitchens creates is a stupid echo server which simply sends its input back where it came from. Having read this, I certainly didn't feel ready to implement readiness selction myself which means that, for me at least, the book does not do what it's supposed to do. Ttip for any future edition: make the examples applicable to real world problems; that lame echo server could, with a little more work, have been turned into a simple but usable HTTP server.