Book review: Lemay’s latest “Java 1.1” title fails to deliver

Last year I approached a U.K. publisher with a proposal to write a book on Java. The publisher brushed my proposal aside, stating that his market research indicated that a flood of Java books was on its way and that he didn’t want to compete in any bloody topic stampedes.

I privately thought he was joking when he said more than 100 Java titles were on their way, but he turned out to be serious (and apparently understated the number of Java books to be published, which now dwarfs the 100-title mark): Publishing Java books is big business and everyone is pushing and shoving (kicking and stabbing?) to get their titles onto bookstores’ finite shelf space.

Unfortunately, the smell of money makes many people behave inappropriately, and so some publishers have started cutting (and pasting) corners — or in this case, hundreds of pages. Some restrict themselves to using a small pair of scissors, others go for the chain saw.

This article was supposed to be a book review, but instead, my dislike of dishonesty — and my sense of civic duty — made me morph it into a short open letter to the Java book-publishing industry as a whole, and one publishing house in particular.

Interactive? Java 1.1? Hardly!

Recently Waite Group Press sent me a review copy of a brand new title, Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course (co-written by Charles Perkins, Michael Morrison, Daniel Groner; ISBN 1-57169-0832; 9.99)

Let’s analyze that title for a second, in particular the “Java 1.1 Interactive Course” part. Version 1.1 of the JDK is, as we all know by now, a much more mature animal than JDK 1.0.2. Indeed, JDK 1.1 has twice as many classes. This fact alone should warrant a second Java book flood. Waite Group Press’s book looks to be one of the first in this second, JDK 1.1, wave. Or is it?

A bit of inspection revealed that Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course is not truly a new book, at least in terms of its content. Rather, aside from a few new chapters, this “Java 1.1 Interactive Course” is a well-camouflaged, barely edited remold of the best-seller Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days (also by Lemay and Perkins) — a book published more than a year ago by Sams Publishing, when JDK 1.1 was still on the drawing boards.

This disturbing fact means:

1. The “new” book deals almost entirely with Java 1.0.2, not Java 1.1. (Chapters 1-21 out of 25 are almost exact copies of the older book; one section even plainly states that the current version of the JDK is 1.0.2!)
2. The “new” book is no more interactive than its predecessor. (In other words, it is not interactive at all.)

Pulp fiction

To inflate the page count from an honest 527 pages in Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days to a bloated 1,194 pages for Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course, Waite Group Press added 433 pages(!) of appendices, of which 370 are devoted to a reference of the Java core packages — the 1.0.2 core packages. (I don’t need to remind readers that many computer book classics made it big with fewer than 370 pages total.) Another appendix (taken, like the bulk of the book, verbatim from its predecessor) depicts class hierarchy diagrams for the core packages. Again, these are 1.0.2 diagrams, not 1.1 diagrams.

Any reader familiar with Sams’ Teach Yourself series book launched more than a year ago will know or remember that much of the book uses applets, and hence AWT classes and methods, for its examples. None of the “new” book’s examples have been updated to avoid the numerous deprecated AWT methods or even stay clear of the wholly deprecated mechanism of 1.0-style event handling. (JDK 1.1 uses a radically new mechanism called the Delegation Event Model.)

On the interactive-course front, the “new” book does add “Questions” sections that the Teach Yourself book didn’t have. But I tried answering the multiple-choice questions by prodding the tick boxes on the pages. They didn’t generate any interactive feedback. I thought: “OK, the interactivity must be on the CD-ROM” (I imagined something like MindQ Inc.’s range of CD-ROM-based interactive Java courses), but the CD-ROM didn’t even contain the multiple-choice questions, let alone any interactive courses.

The interactivity, it turns out, is to be found on Waite’s Web site, in the form of something called the “eZone” (this stands for “education zone”).

If we ignore the fact that outside the U.S., the majority of people in this global market have to pay steep, by-the-minute (Internet) dial-up charges to access this interactivity, then you will find that the eZone boils down to Web pages with the same multiple-choice quizzes from the book, with one added feature: Waite’s Web server will evaluate your answers and give you a score. The whole process is supposedly dead serious because your scores can be accumulated and traded for “continuing education units certified by Marquette University.” Marquette must be issuing lots of certificates because the answers to the quizzes are in Appendix N of the book! Enough said.

Environmental (un)awareness

Although Waite Group Press (a Macmillan Computer Publishing company, like Sams Publishing (surprise!), QUE, New Riders, and others) makes a big deal about “environmental awareness” and how many trees need to be chopped down to produce a book, I wonder where that awareness was when they produced Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course. Packing a book that tips the scales at well over two kilos of tree with out-of-date material (despite a title that boasts about the book’s Java 1.1 pedigree) seems to demonstrate a cynical form of hypocrisy, rather than any genuine environmental awareness and/or concerns.

Summary

Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course does not focus on Java 1.1 (not by a long shot), and neither the printed pages nor the companion CD-ROM provides a truly interactive course. It appears to be the work of some people trying to pull a fast one by repackaging an out-of-date best-seller with a new cover and a few new chapters in the hope that would-be Java programmers would be too ignorant to notice.

The honorable way to bring out the new book would have been to call it a new edition of Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days and to honestly indicate the proportion of 1.0.2 versus 1.1 material — and interactive content — in the book.

Yes, Java is very hot, and we should have a diversity of books on the subject to inform, train, and enlighten the millions of programmers out there. But when publishers churn out products like Laura Lemay’s Java 1.1 Interactive Course, it’s time to tell those publishers they’ve strayed from the path of the time-honored book publisher who produces honest, high-quality, and valuable books.

For those in the Java books biz in need of a reminder, look up the definition of ethics. And for the readers, let’s all remember the Latin saying: Caveat emptor.