Review by Billy Barron

"Advanced Java Networking" by Sridharan (Prentice Hall; ISBN 0-13-749136-0) is a book I had much hope for being useful to me, much in the way the Steven's UNIX Network Programming book is. The book does cover all the different major Java networking topics though I would have liked to see some material on ObjectSpace's Voyager product. The fault of this ommission lies more with ObjectSpace's lackluster promotion of this free top notch Java networking technology.

I've only briefly browsed parts of the book. Sridharan's writing style is clear and readable. However, the technical accuracy of, at least, the parts of the book I looked at was terrible. I found both many subtle and a few glaring mistakes, like saying UDP stood for Unreliable Datagram Protocol. After several of these errors hit me in just a few minutes (and I never tested the code in the book), I reached the conclusion that I unfortunately can not trust the material contained within this book.

To make matters worse, I did not find an e-mail address in the book where I could report errors. The web site listed for corrections does not have this book listed on it at the time of the review.

I hope that Prentice Hall quickly disposes of the current edition and hires a serious technical editor to go over the book to correct errors. I'll happily re-review the book if revised as I saw much potential in this book but the errors I was enough of a problem that I can not in good faith recommend the first edition of this book. As a partial alternative, take a look at Java Network Programming.