I’m a big fan of Maven and have considered writing a book on Maven2, however that’s not necessary now as Jason Van Zyl has posted his book, Maven: The Definitive Guide. It’s almost complete and when I’m finished reading it end-to-end I’ll post more comments, but since good Maven2 information is hard to find I’m posting now. There is also a downloadable version of the book.
Please give it a read and send your feedback to Jason.
JavaScript is a very powerful language and the more I use it the more I see it’s power. It’s very LISP like with its use of associative arrays to manage objects and it’s use of functions as first class objects.
In JavaScript you can create a new function and associate that function with a variable. When a function is invoked with ‘new’ then the result is an object. For example:
// assign a function to a variable.
var func = function(x,y) {return x + y;}
// create an object
var point = new Point(x,y);
An object can have functions added to it at runtime. We call these functions methods since they are associated with an instance and have access to the variable ‘this’.
The function object has access to the arguments to the function as an array. So you could iterate through the variable list of arguments and take an appropriate action. For example, you could convert each parameter into a method call on the object and call it. Very powerful.
For a quick and cheap reference to what JavaScript can do I recommend the book JavaScript Pocket Reference by David Flanagan (2nd Edition) from O’Reilly.
Maven A Developer’s Notebook, Vincent Massol & Timothy O’Brien (O’Reilly) is about Maven 1 and the book is fantastic. I really like the ‘A Developer’s Notebook’ series and style. Very clear, easy to use and relevant with no fluff. My biggest gripe is that there isn’t a version for Maven 2. Which reminds me, I must send an email to the publishers to ask why, so if your reading this, please do the same.
For Maven 2 I’d recommend starting with Better Builds With Maven which can be downloaded in softcopy. It’s a very good overview and exploration of Maven 2 features, but it’s not a developers notebook. Don’t forget to read the errata on the web site.
The Design Patterns Java Workbook, Steven John Metsker (Addison-Wesley) is a great book covering the usual Desing Patterns and more with a set of exercises after each pattern to test your knowledge. The book is very clear and concise with good class diagrams and java code. There are 15 patterns covered. I found this book a more useful read than the Head First series on the same topic.
Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow by Seth Ladd with Darren Davison, Steven Devijver, and Colin Yates (Apress) describes how to use Spring to implement the MVC pattern and workflow in the context of Web Applications. The book is very detailed and covers the topics well and even looks at Ajax and DWR.
After using Spring MVC I’m not keen to use anything else.
Effective Java, Programming Language Guide by Joshua Bloch (Addison-Wesley) is a book I think all Java programmers should read and then read again on a regular basis. It’s simple and effective (pardon the pun). The book makes you think about your code and how it will be used and how it can be used and abused. A must have for your java bookshelf.
Java Message Service by Richard Monson-Haefel & David A. Chappell, O’Reilly.
Excellent book that covers all the topics. A few more code examples on tricky scenarios would be nice but this is a great starter. If your new to JMS then this is the book for you.
Inside Servlets, Server-Side Programming for the Java Platform, Dustin R. Callaway, Addison Wesley.
This is a good book with great examples and explainations but Im not too sure how relevant this books is anymore given that most of the lower level servlet stuff is essentially hidden by frameworks now-a-days. However, before writing anything at the servlet level I’d certainly give this book a read.
Beginning RSS and Atom Programming, Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt (Wrox) .
There are a lot of great books in the ‘Programmer to Programmer” series and this book is no exception. The explainations are clear and informative. This book covers everything feed related.
This book could be in a protocol section but since a lot of the code example are in java, this is where im putting it.
Java NIO by Ron Hitchens, O’Reilly is a succinct introduction to the much anticipated Non-blocking IO subsystem for java. However, this topic fills only half the book with the other half devoted to regular expressions.
NIO is the way to go !
This is a neat implementation of XMLRPC using NIO with a detailed tutorial.