Book Title: Java^tm Media APIs

Author: Terrazas, Ostuni, and Barlow

Publisher: SAMS

ISBN: 0672320940

Review by Billy Barron

Paperback - 2002, 828 pages

Yet again, a book that was published two years after I have a need for it and would have bought it in an instant. At that time, I was working on a telecommunications project that was using RTP (Real-Time Protocol). It was extremely hard to find good documentation on the nature of the RTP support built into JMF. We ended up rolling our own RTP implementation instead. This book has a good chapter on RTP in it.

Okay, let's back up and talk about the book at hand now. The book is broken into three major pieces: Java 2D, Java Media Framework (JMF), and Java 3D. It also has the usual introduction and conclusion. It is nice to have all this material in one place as opposed to some other publishing which try to sell you multiple thin books on each individual topic.

The style of the book is writing interspaced with code examples. The output from the examples are unfortunately in black and white instead of color. Color is a very important part of the 2D API. I'm sure this was done to reduce the cost. For example, Prentice Hall has "Java 2D API Graphics" book which is half the size of this book with full color, but it costs almost as much as this book.

The book ends with a chapter on how to tie together the three different technologies that are covered in this book. This is often overlooked need missed by many books.

Overall, this book is a worthwhile introduction to the various Media related technologies all in one place.