Ground Up Java


Author: Philip Heller

ISBN:

0782141900

Publisher: Sybex

Reviewed by: Ben Evans

[Caveat: Throughout the book, mention is made of the Illustrated Exercises. These are java programs designed to act as online labs or 'magic workbooks'. The screenshots look enticing and similar tools have proved to be very useful as teaching aids in other circumstances. Unfortunately, the disc with my copy failed to mount on any of the Linux or Windows machines I tried it on so I am unable to comment on their suitability or effectiveness].

This book purports to be an introductory programming text, to teach the complete beginner how to program through the vehicle of the Java language. It makes a number of claims about being the only such book, and about having a unique approach to the subject.

Unfortunately, there are already a large number of books that occupy this space, and I have read more than a few that treat the subject in the same way that Heller claims is unique. It will be painfully familiar to anyone who has tried to teach beginners -- the text makes no real attempt made to discuss the subject in anything other than the standard pedagogical way and the average student will quickly be lost or bored or both.

The early chapters, in particular, are not good. The introductory chapter introduces an imaginary virtual machine called SimCom and its associated assembly language. In no way is this material suitable for the first chapter of a book which is supposed to be for absolute beginnners. The very reason high-level languages were developed in the first place was to prevent the typical programmer from having to deal with the actual nature of the machine.

In later chapters the precedence given to the material is somewhat bizarre. Java's features which prevent pointer arithmetic (at least by the casual user) are dismissed in a couple of paragraphs (without so much as a mention of why this is an important security feature as compared to C/C++, or even using the word 'overflow') whereas five pages of Chapter 3 are devoted to bitwise operations. A strange choice for a beginners book on Java. Equally, discussion of the formats used internally for numbers seems irrelevant to the average beginner, except those poor souls doomed to program early versions of J2ME.

The treatment of operator precedence is also substandard. I found myself having to read the discussion several times, as the sense was unclear. I'm sure a beginner would have been confused by it. There are numerous other problems - that post and pre-increment are treated as entirely equivalent is just one example.

Another low point is the treatment of exceptions. The opening, oversimplified treatment seems to imply that exceptions are preferable to error codes because the former allow the programmer to write less code or do less work. It is this kind of attitude which encourages programmers to write coarse-grained handlers and other bad habits in their dealings with exceptions. The statement that runtime exceptions should never be caught in production code is laudable but laughably unrealistic. In practice, beginning and intermediate Java programmers will need (or worse, be told to) catch these due to a whole host of possible factors (integration with shoddy binary-only 3rd party code, desire to never display error screens to the end user, management hubris, etc.). Far better to discuss these cases, and explain that while a proper usage of exceptions is a pain in the neck, failure to do so will ultimately lead to bad and broken code.

The typesetting also lets the book down -- the sections are too long and not broken up with breakout boxes, key facts are not highlighted and it is very hard to see which concepts are the important ones and which simply supporting material.

If this really represents the state of the art in beginners Java books then the market is clearly still wide open for a text which attempts to teach proper practice as well as syntax and which brings to the fore the design patterns principles which underlie so much of Java's design and theory. Most importantly (and this is perhaps the biggest failing of Heller's book) a book is needed which discourages beginners from developing the bad habits responsible for the bloated, inelegant, antipattern-ridden systems which are sadly all too familiar to working programmers in the field.