Review by Billy Barron

"JavaBeans Developer's Resource" by Sridharan (Prentice Hall; ISBN 0-13-570789-7) is the second book I've reviewed from this author in a short period of time. The other was Advanced Java Networking which I disliked due to finding many inaccuracies. Unfortunately, though I am a networking expert, I am a novice at JavaBeans so in the case of the current book, I don't know if the accuracy is better or that I do not know enough to catch the errors.

The author definitely is not short on ego "I was ... the founder and progenitor of the Java Revolution". Pretty bold for a guy I never heard of before. Also, the author recently quit Sun and went to work for Microsoft. It seems like he has a chip on his shoulder and several times takes random potshots at Sun. If he would back up potshots with facts and reasoning, then I wouldn't feel so negative about it. However, in this case, I didn't even make it out of the Introduction before the tone of the books grated on my nerves.

The first chapter is called "Advanced Java" and warns early on that "This book assumes you know the language". I'm then confused about why the author spends about the next 10 pages going over classes, interfaces, methods and other basic concept. If you know the language, you already know these things.

The book goes on and covers component models, events, properties, introspection, persistence, gui builders, integration, and networking. Every chapter ends with a whole page about Coffee. Being a non-coffee drinker, needless to say, I found it to be a waste of paper.

I decided to read the Events chapter all the way through since I haven't yet programmed with the 1.1 event model. After reading the chapter in this book, I do not feel that I am any better off than better.

Though you have probably gathered that I don't like this book, I will admit that it was useful for a few things like learning to tie together ActiveX and JavaBeans.