Murachs beginning Java with Netbeans - Book review

Murachs beginning Java with Netbeans

This my review of the book entitled “MURACHS BEGINNINING JAVA WITH NETBEANS”. This book is intended to teach the user to program in the Java language using the Netbeans IDE.

I downloaded the Java SDK and then downloaded Netbeans. Generally, the downloads were easy to install and worked well. I also downloaded the examples from Murach.com onto my hard drive. The examples worked well when I ran them. So we got off to a good start.

Chapters 1 – 10

The Java programming language.

I won’t get heavily into detail here but I worked my way through the book and followed the examples along the way. But I got a feeling that the book was too heavy on the theory side of things and not good on the practical aspect. While the text in the book was fairly clear, I still got to the end of these chapters feeling that I had not got a solid grasp of Java itself. The book only uses one practical example per chapter. I felt that I was doing a lot of reading but not a lot of understanding.

To compensate for this, I went to the website http://www.thenewboston.com and followed the examples on that particular website (all 64 of them). The author gave simple but concise explanations of each programming concept followed by easy to follow examples. I have to say that I felt that I got a better grasp of Java by doing that than following the examples in this book.

Chapters 11 onwards

From this point onwards, I felt the theory side of the book was getting very heavy and harder to follow. As I started to read about interfaces, inheritance, Lambdas etc., very little began to make any sense just going on the text and examples. Once again I had to resort to Youtube videos from third party instructors such as Sue Ceklovsky and John Morris to get a handle on the concepts that these topics were discussing.

Summing up.

I realise that this review is a bit brief but I will summarise the book this way. Too heavy on theory and not real good on practice. I feel that a lot more easy to follow examples would be better here, rather than just one example per chapter. Java is not hard to pick up but once you get into the more difficult concepts such as inheritance and polymorphism, it gets difficult to follow.

These concepts needs to be simply explained and unfortunately, I felt that by Chapter 12, your explanations were starting to go over my head.

Your usual idea of two pages per topic and only one example per chapter did not work well here at all.

I am sorry if this review is a bit brief but I do not feel that a chapter by chapter review is necessary. Programming needs to be explained simply and well. I have found that I learn better by doing, not reading and I ask that maybe in future you use more of an example based approach accompanied by an explanation of the concepts.

Cheers

Gerry Gates