Editorial Reviews:
Java is generally a well-documented language, but not every language feature is fully specified, documented, or identical across all platforms. Java Secrets takes you into this Java twilight zone and introduces you to the language's hidden power. The book's first section explores the inner workings of many Java mechanisms, including representation of data types in memory, argument passing, and the implementation of strings and arrays. The author also investigates niceties of threading models and garbage collection as implemented on different Java platforms. A large group of undocumented classes (the sun.* packages) constitute what amounts to an undocumented Java application programming interface (API). The next large section of Java Secrets details these classes and how to use them safely. Although these classes ostensibly exist to support the Java environment, you'll learn how to use many of their interfaces for a variety of tasks including layout management; FTP, HTTP, mail, and news communication; data encoding; and character conversion. A final big chunk of the book is devoted to techniques for adding platform-dependent features to Java applications. This is a controversial subject for a supposedly platform-independent programming system, but the author provides a balanced assessment of the benefits and drawbacks. All in all, this is one of the most interesting, unusual, and engagingly written books on Java programming we've seen. It's hard to imagine a serious Java programmer who wouldn't find it well worth his or her time.
There are plenty of books on Java out there but Java Secrets is one of a kind. Java Secrets picks up where all the others leave off, daring to tread into parts of Java that Sun Microsystems hasn't documented, that aren't generally accessible within a Web browser, and that haven't appeared in other Java books. If you're content creating nifty applets to jazz up Web pages, you probably don't need Java Secrets. But if you want to write serious, stand-alone Java applications and Web applets that do useful things like allow live chats and interface with Usenet newsgroups, you need the information that author and Java expert Elliote Rusty Harold reveals in this comprehensive, in-depth guide. Plus, on the bonus CD-ROM accompanying Java Secrets, you get full versions of WingDis 2.0.3 (the Java decompiler) and JDK 1.1 as well as many essential shareware and freeware programs for Java power-programmers.
Customer Reviews:
 Interesting book on the Java Language - lots of mistakes
There sun classes are interesting, but outdated now. The book contains many typos and misprintings. This author seems to write books in a rapid succession and unfortunately includes a lot of mistakes. Mistake-riddled seems to be a common theme in most reviews of Rusty's books. Great for reference.
This is not a book where you gonna learn how to write HalloWorld.java and that's GREAT!! This book allow you to learn some new things about java that you didn't know before, but not as much new stuff as the author promised you in the beginning of the book. If you have programmed java for a while and want to discover new tricks of java, this could be the book for you. Wait for the second edition.
This book promises a lot, and often delivers.
However, there are enough deficiencies that
the prospective buyer should consider waiting
for the second edition.
The biggest problem with the book is that, like
so many other Java titles, it was rushed out the
door. This is most apparent in the book's
figures, which range from perplexing to downright
misleading, due to widespread errors and omissions. For example, the diagram of the byte
layout for a little-endian machine is simply
wrong. Various other diagrams which show the
stack before and after various bytecode operations are half-finished -- literally. They
have one or two parameters filled in, and the
rest are blank.
It's mind-boggling that the editors thought it wasn't important enough to get these simple things right and delay the book's release slightly. But that seems to be the current thinking behind many current Java books.
Fortunately, Harold's text is generally correct, even when the figures aren't. So if you're willing to pointedly ignore the figures, you can get some good information from the book.
My only other complaint is a more subjective one: While promising to reveal Java secrets, much of the book focuses on the Sun classes, which are not guaranteed to be portable at all -- Harold addresses all this well, but the bottom line is that well over 50% of the book is devoted to these non-portable classes. If this is what you're looking for, it's a great resource, but if you are not interested in the inner workings of the Sun packages, you may be somewhat disappointed.
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