Java After Hours: 10 Projects You'll Never Do at Work

I can easily understand how Steven Holzner manages to write so many books in so many diffent subjects.. he knows extremely little about them all, and is a master only at hiding the superficiality of his skills and knowledle.Take this book for example. Nice cover, cool title, great overall idea for a technical book: learning advanced Java programming techniques while playing with some "unconventional" and "fun-oriented" applications..the best way to learn.. learn by doing and by doing something fun.. Too bad the author is not up to the task. The program he presents in this book are mostly horribly insignificant. To give you an idea of what I mean by that one of the projects, pompously called "weblogger" is nothing more than a simple, stinky web-app filter printing a line of text for every request to your webapp. Basically nothing more than your "hello world" filter. Just very few of the projects deserve more attention and even for those the author quicky glosses over the most interesting parts leaving you alone to figure out the code. And the code, the code.. well the level is pretty the one you would expect from a good college student who has had a couple of semester of Java programming. I understand well mr Holzner because I am kind of an eclectic learner myself, I like to study and tinker with different areas and technologies, only I don't have the "bronze face" (as we say here in Italy) to sell myself as an expert in a field where I have just superficially played.Someone please find a decent job for this guy, so he will stop polluting the world with his books at the expense of many wasted tree and many more naive readers.If you 're interested in some high quality, elegant, professional level java code examples give a try to: Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition No shiny book cover, no marketing hype, no cool sounding app names but you will surely learn a lot from that book. No wonder, it's from a real tech author, not an amateur with good marketing sense.

This book is for experienced Java programmers that don't need a rehash of the basics and want to try some interesting projects as well as learn some new techniques and tricks such as sending JPEGs back from a web server, grabbing web pages from Java code, creating drop shadows in Java2D, using online filters, and controlling any other program robotically.This book contains 10 projects, along with some minor projects used for illustration purposes. One of these subprojects builds an entire web server you can run from your desktop, given an Internet connection and a fixed IP address, which you probably have if you have a broadband connection. The following is a summary of the book's contents:Chapter 1: Aquarium-- A multithreaded fish-swimming project with fish that swim realistically against a bubbly background.Chapter 2: Slapshot -- A multithreaded hockey game that moves. You play against the computer and set the speed. And when you set the speed in the upper 90s, you've got a good chance of losing.Chapter 3: The Graphicizer-- An image-editing and conversion tool. This one lets you read in JPG, PNG, or GIF files and save images in JPG or PNG format. You can work with images pixel by pixel, embossing them, sharpening them, brightening them, blurring them, reducing them, and so on. And you can even undo the most recent change.Chapter 4: Painter-- Lets you draw your own images from scratch--ellipses, rectangles, lines, and so on. You can even draw freehand with the mouse. You can also draw each shape open or filled, using a texture fill, a solid color fill, or a gradient fill. You can draw text. You can give shapes a drop shadow, or make them transparent. You can draw using thin lines or thick lines. You can set the drawing color. And not only can you save your work when done, you can also read in images and work on them, annotating them with text or adding your own graphics.Chapter 5: The Chat project-- In this project you create your own private Internet chat room that will keep you in touch with anyone over the Internet. All you need is Internet access and a Java-enabled web server. You can have as many people in your chat room as you like. What they type, you can see, and what you type, they can see. Type all you like--all you're paying for is the local Internet connection.Chapter 6: WebLogger-- Log access to your website. This project lets you log users who access your website by access time, authentication type, username (if they've logged in), user IP address, the URL they accessed on your site, their browser type, the milliseconds they were there for, and so on. All without their knowledge.Chapter 7: The Robot project-- This interesting project lets you control any other program by remote control; just tell it what to do. You can send text to the other program you're controlling. You can use the ALT and CNTL keys. You can send tab characters, the Enter key, or the ESC key. You can also use the mouse--just enter the screen location (in pixels) where you want the mouse to move to. Then click the mouse, right-click it, or double-click it. You can also take screen captures. If you want to automate working with any program, the Robot will do it.Chapter 8: The Browser project-- This project lets you create a fully featured browser that subclasses Microsoft Internet Explorer in your Java applications.Chapter 9: The Intercom project-- This project lets two people type across the Internet. You just start up the project, connect with the click of a button, and you've got your own connection: Everything you type into the Intercom, the other use can see, and everything the other user types, you can see. This one is a client/server application and connects directly across the Internet using its own protocol--unlike the Chat project, no Java-enabled web server is needed here at all.Chapter 10: The Forecaster project-- Displays a four-day temperature forecast for your area, starting with today's high and low temperatures. All you've got to do is to tell the Forecaster your ZIP Code, and it'll give you the forecast by reading its data from the National Weather Service and sending a JPEG image from the server back to the browser.I'm a Java multimedia programmer, and I found this an interesting collection of projects and ideas for games and utilities I am working on. It is much more interesting than all of those enterprise Java books that are necessary for getting stuff done at work, but are not that inspiring. I recommend this project-based book to anyone curious about just what can be done with Java.

As another reader wrote, the book title and description give the idea that you can use this book to learn by doing, by following the projects in the book. The author, however, has a very different idea. The projects are not presented in a way that can be implemented part by part, learning from each part. Rather, to do a project you have the option of downloading the code or typing typing it yourself. Either way you won't find out how each part works. Much less would you learn how the entire project works. The author makes suggestions for changing the code. These suggestions amount to changing a parameter here or there -nothing that would change or illustrate how the code works. The most you could learn from this book is how to type code (and how not to write a programming book).

I like several of the ideas; I thought hockey would be good, but it is pong.The robot and web browser are very interesting ideas. You can really think of things to do with these.The ideas and examples would have given this book a higher rating but there were a couple problems that I list below.Bad ideas of the writer; first is listing the main functions for class. First the method names and parameters and return types doesn't really help. It just took up space.Second bad thing is the way code is shown in the book, here are pieces of the code, now filling in other pieces, and just continuing along those lines. I would prefer the entire program and list the line numbers, in writing just identify the line numbers.I think every chapter would be about a fifth the size if the code didn't extend so long and the class methods were delete.

Great quality for a used book for an incredible price. Would order again, no question.

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