Rating:  - Much better than the first version
I'm blown away by how much better the second version has improved from the first. I was so disappointed by the first edition that I swore off O'Reilly for a little while. One of my major gripes, the rampant use of classes provided by the author in libraries has all but vanished. In addition the anti-patterns of bad SQL use that are so rampant in other Java books are nowhere to be found, and in their place are recipes that show sane and proper use of JDBC.
I heartily recommend this practical work for Java engineers. For those not familiar with the first edition this is a solid practical work that covers a wide range of Java programming challenges. For those turned off by the first edition, you should take a look at the second, the improvement is profound.
Rating:  - Excellent for Beginners and Intermediate Developers
I'm relatively new to Java and having this book makes finding simple answers easy. For beginners and intermediate developers this is a wonderful resource when you don't know the answer off the top of your head. I was thrown into coding in Java at my job without any formal training so I'm learning the language as I develop solutions for clients. This book helps me get my job done quicker and also helps me understand the language better.
Rating: - Must have Java reference...
This book has almost 800 pages of incredibly useful information. If you're unsure of how to do something in Java, it's a pretty good bet there is an answer in this book. The second edition includes coverage of the Java 1.5 release (such as generic types and enumerations) and updates or adds missing info from previous versions (such as the Java regular expressions API).
Most of the "recipes" in the cookbook have reference to other "recipes", online resources or other books - and not always other O'Reilly books, which implies (at least to me) the author really wants to get you the best information possible. Also, both the Table of Contents and the Index are well laid out and will help you get a quick answer to any question you may have.
The book assumes you have basic Java knowledge, but I'd recommend it for any Java programmer, beginner or advanced. There are a lot of examples included in the text and you can download the source from the author's web site. This should be at the top of any Java developer's list of books to own.
Highly recommend.
Rating: - Keeps up the style of the first edition
[A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2004]
The salient feature that distinguishes this second edition from its predecessor is the coverage of Java 1.5. The overall format of the book is unchanged. There are over 100 "hacks" that address common problems a Java programmer might face.
The grouping of hacks into chapters is quite logical. But you are expected to already know the basics of Java programming. This book is not meant to teach that, but to help fill in gaps in your overall knowledge framework. The solutions are typically easy to understand. That is the tenor of the book. You can quickly see if a solution fits your needs and then easily apply it.
The 1.5 features are sprinkled throughout the chapters. Because the numerous changes from 1.4 are distributed over many aspects of the language. So Darwin correctly chose not to aggregate these into one location. Which also means that this book is not the place to learn specifically about 1.5 as a whole. (Try "Java 1.5 Tiger" by McLaughlin and Flanagan.)
Rating: - Invaluable reference guide
Ok, You've been writing Java code for months, maybe even a couple of years. Objects aren't anything special... they're just the natural way to do things. You don't even need to LOOK at the Servlet API anymore. You might even have a SCJP or SCWCD under your belt.
Then, for the first time in years, it happens: you need to interact with a real, honest-to-god file sitting on the hard drive. Or parse a String into a Date object. And this time, you can't just throw the job at Tomcat or JDBC and let it do the dirty work for you. And to your absolute horror, you realize that you don't have the slightest clue in hell how to do it in Java.
That's right... simple, trivial things like file i/o. Something stupid, like reading a text file into a String. After cursing Gosling and Sun for a half hour for not giving String a constructor that takes a File object as its argument and making things that should be trivially easy to do needlessly complicated [ok, all in unison... 'if ((foo != null) && (foo.equals("whatever")))', vs. 'if (foo == "whatever")' ...], it sinks in: You don't know how to do it. Well, OK, that's not quite fair. You have a general idea. Hell, you did it all the time in Perl and C++. You know it probably has something to do with java.io.File, and following the deprecation chain from java.util.Date will lead you to java.util.Calendar. But the devil's in the details, and trying to figure out how to do it from the javadocs alone isn't exactly the most efficient way to burn an afternoon. Especially since all the nice, convenient methods that let you ignore ugly things like character encoding were deprecated LONG ago. Ditto for date parsing.
OK, so you dig out the old books you haven't touched in months, maybe years, on introductory Java. They ignore the topic completely. File I/O? Date parsing? Ewwwwwwww. That's *so* 20th century. Objects, Swing, and j2ee are SO much sexier and profitable to write about. What? You really DO need to soil your hands and do it? Well, you'll have to look elsewhere.
That's where this book comes in. It covers all the non-glamourous stuff that 99% of the books on Java more or less ignore or gloss over. Things like I/O. Text handling. You get the idea. The stuff that everyone wants to just delegate to the servlet container or database, but occasionally you really DO need to deal with directly. There's not really anything in this book that you can't find online. But that's not the point... you can blow an hour or two scavenging the info and experimenting to make it work, or you can get the answer in 2 minutes with this book.
Buy it. BEFORE you need it. You'll be glad you did.
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