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

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

Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of wasted space
Comment: I was reading this book and about to post a comment regarding the wasted space and pages. Well there it is, exactly what I wanted to say in the previous post. It should be a way thinner book if not for those silly main()s.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: OK book for Java Ideas
Comment: This is an ok book for people that want to learn what they can do with Java. The projects are explained well. I didn't think any of the projects were that exciting

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, fun, but wasting space
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A good book for learning fun techniques in Java
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun book
Comment: This is a fun book to advance your programming and Java skills a bit.

The strength of this book is not that it has complete code for 10 projects. It is that each of these projects have nearly unlimited potential for adding in features.

Take the aquarium for instance. I added in a simple GUI popup to control how many fish, their individual speeds, supports unlimited fish photos, change backgrounds, add in whales, sharks, dolphins crabs, ect. In addition, the shark can randomly pick a fish every so often and eat it, along with sounds from Jaws. Next I am going to add in fisherman and divers.

The great thing is that all of the projects are this way. Even if you are not inclined to etend the projects, there is still alot to learn from the basic projects.

There is complete source code on the books web site. BTW, the Aquarium does not feature multithreaded fish. Each fish is not a thread. There is exactly one explicit thread in the program.

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