Review by Billy Barron

"Advanced Java: Idioms, Pitfalls, Styles, and Programming Tips" by Laffra (Prentice Hall; ISBN 0-13-534348-8) is a strange book. It has only 4 chapters. The first is called "Idioms, Pitfalls, and Programming Tips". It is full of little known facts about Java. The second covers the Little Toolkit (LTK) which is an alternative to AWT. It is interesting to see another way to do things besides AWT. The third chapter is on debugging Java programs, which is useful for less knowledgable programmers. The final chapter talks about a C++ to Java translator that is included, which may be of interest to C++ people.

This is a book that I'll probably keep on my shelf and refer to occassionally, but not on a regular basis. If I was doing heavy duty GUI programming, I'd look at the LTK to see what I could use.