Francis reviewed this book in C Vu November 1997 and I tend to agree with him. I opened this expecting something along the lines of the excellent C++ FAQs by Cline and Lomow (also published by Addison Wesley), which is aimed at profession programmers tackling difficult problems developing C++ based systems. This book, however, is at a much more introductory level ('what is a final class', 'Can I put menus and a menu bar on my applet?', etc.). The basic Java language is much simpler than C++ having automatic garbage collection and without pointers, overloaded operators, templates, etc. (which take many chapters in C++ FAQs ). However, other things such as basic I/O (reading an integer number from the keyboard in Java is not as simple as
cin>> i) are more difficult and the Java APIs are large and complicated.
This book covers the basic language, applets, AWT, events (in Java 1.0 and 1.1), drawing, threads, I/O, etc., in the main at the level of a beginner/ intermediate Java programmer. A professional programmer would probably be better off with a good set of reference manuals. To suit the professional programmer Java FAQs would need much more depth in the area of the APIs, in particular the complexities of the AWT. Not suitable (or intended as) a Java learning text but fine as a backup text for the beginner/intermediate programmer.
