A book by RonF Hitchens
No, that's not a mistake the F in the RonF, I really meant it.. in italian "ronf ronf" stands for the sleeping snore, and that's what you will be doing if you try to read this book. I had to struggle with myself real hard to force my way through this book, and trust me, I am used to reading books that are not exactly pure entertainment. The material presented is actually quite accurate and useful, only the presentation style is abysmally boring, arid and schematic. Even the table of contents reflects that, it goes: Buffer - Channel - Selectors - Regexp - Charsets. Every subject is explained pretty much in isolation of each other. How can you possibly put together anything even remotely engaging and conving with a style like that? It's like trying to teach you the english language using a dictionary, first learn all the words that start with A, then let's go to the B...
The irony is that in the intro to chap 1, the author even makes jokes about IO not being so dull as usually believed. Well I agree with him , but he certainly managed to make an outstanding contribution to the dullness of IO. Should he be congratulated?
Pretty good overview but consider using a framework.
This is a pretty good overview, particularly for those who have no previous experience with non-blocking IO. The author explains the concept of buffers very well, with useful diagrams illustrating the differences between position, limit, etc.
The material on selectors and readiness selection is also strong.
The problem is, there are idiosyncracies to NIO that make it difficult to use effectively for large-scale, high-performance applications without some in-depth knowledge.
If you're really looking to architect a substantial NIO server or client, read this book for the overview, but also be sure to take a look at the open source Netty framework by Trustin Lee, or Ember IO by Mike Spille to see good NIO implementations that you can use as a building block.
Ok, but no great.
I am not sure what else is out there? The book ok, but not really remarkable in any way.
A Great Book for NIO
NIO is a great IO class, I think it's the best package presented by Sun since Swing, it provides you with more than what you need from NIO class in just 250 pages.
Good introduction to NIO (and regular exprs??), lacks depth
The book is useful to get started on nio, but you may overgrow it after a week:
it does not delve deeply into the matter. Particularly missing are:
- Mapped byte buffer uses
- Interactions between java & else using mapped files
- OS/platform idiosyncrasies (limits etc)
- Performance analysisFinally, be aware that half of the book is devoted to regular expressions. The conflagration of nio and regexps is rather strange. I would rather have a shorter book with just a little more depth.
