Honestly, I have to say I was surprised to see that (at the time of this writing) this book was averaging 4.5 stars on Amazon. I suppose my expectations of this book were heavily swayed by the title. I was expecting something a little more generic and high-level than what I got.
I think the book makes a decent attempt to provide the reader with ‘recipes’ that can be used to improve their efficiency and productivity. But the recipes themselves seem to be a little too free-flowing: by the time I got around to the 3rd or 4th recipe, I had already forgotten the overarching theme of the chapter. I feel like the material might’ve been better presented in the style of O’Reilly’s “Cookbook” book. I doubt a reader, after one pass through the book, will be able to implement every recipe they read about. I think it would be better to structure the book as a reference that they can flip through later.
Another issue I had with the book was that in the later half of the book, many of the examples given contain chunks (sometimes large chunks) of Java, Ruby, and Groovy code. While I’m sure many readers of this book are familiar with those languages, for those who aren’t, the chunks become a serious roadblock to understanding the point of the example. Many of the examples (the Groovy ones, especially) cannot simply be interpreted ‘by sight’. Perhaps a future edition of the book could have some type of fair warning at the beginning.
If you are a java developer, I think you can probably get a lot out of this book. If not, you’ll probably still be able to get a good amount of information out of the first few chapters, but I’d suggest just skimming or skipping the latter chapters altogether.
My rating: 3/5 stars.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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