Database Programming with JDBC & Java: Developing Multi-Tier Applications (Java (O'Reilly))

I'm a Java Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform. I bought this book to begin learning additional APIs. The preface claimed that only a basic knowledge of Java and some understanding of SQL was required. The book was not as advertised. Yes, the book did cover basic and advanced JDBC in two very short chapters, and provided a summary of the features of JDBC Optional Package without giving any details in a third. After reading these chapters I feel I have had an introduction to the subject, but no real depth.The rest of the book takes off into very difficult Java topics (RMI, JNDI, EJB, Java Patterns, Distributed Architectures, Persistence, Swing...)proportedly to demonstrate how JDBC is used in the "real world." From time to time I was actually able to understand some of it, most of the time not. The author did not provide a high level introduction to these topics, which I would have found useful. Rather, the author jumped into the bowels of these subjects in a page or two. The language the author uses is often very exacting such as one might expect to find in a specification. The exacting language and limited number of illustrations caused me to have to re-read many sections several times often to remain confused.The majority of this book was way too ambitious for someone with the background the Prefaces the reader should have. This book may be very useful for a reader with a more advanced background. After I have read several other books covering the "unadvertised-bonus" topics which comprise most of this book more slowly, I will try to read it again.

cheap price; quick and dirty to get up and running to teach son java and all the toys

As an intoduction to JDBC, this is lightweight. About 100 pages are devoted to the JDBC. There is the obligatory API reference at the end that runs to about 90 pages. In between, there are about 120 page devoted to what the author calls "applied JDBC," which is devoted largely to three-tier architecture and transaction handling.Part I covers SQL, JDBC and the JDBC optional package. There is a smattering of sample code and a moderately extended example of an SQL terminal monitor application. The code cries out for refactoring. For example, there is a sequence of roughly 20 lines of code that centers a value within a fixed length field, truncating or padding as appropriate. The same code appears for lables and column values. It should be pulled out into a separate method. Then there are silly things like using System.out and performing a flush instead of using System.err.Part II begins with a brief discussion of JNDI, RMI and EJBs. It then delves into architecture and the development of transaction framework. While what's wanted is largely handled by a J2EE application server, the author's approach is: what if that wasn't available and we had to do it ourselves? There is an extensive collection of code here which again cries out for refactoring.Part III is the JDBC API reference in standard O'Reilly form.The book is disappointing. The JDBC itself is given short shrift and the author goes off on a tangent of questionable value. If a colleague asked me to look at code similar to what's presented here, I'd mark it up with a red pencil, hand it back and tell him/her to refactor. See Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring." There are numerous bad smells here, including duplicate code, long method and large class.

I read this book as I wanted to make sure I've been using JDBC in the correct way. I've been writing software with JDBC, and I needed to be sure that I wasn't doing anything stupid to impact the performance of my software, and wasn't missing out on any functionality that JDBC offers.This book covers everything I wanted to know, and more. It contains a high-level overview of SQL, which was quick to read/skim because the material was familiar. It also covers the history of JDBC and explains why things were done a certain way. It also contains a number of examples that showed me new ways of doing things. I could have Googled much of this information (if I knew what to search for), but it's nice to see it all presented in a single place.Part II was beyond what I was looking for, but interesting all the same. I've read about EJB before, but never used it. It was good to see a discussion of how EJB works and what the various steps were in using EJB to access databases. There was also a good discussion on system architecture with respect to designing business applications. Very high-level, but interesting to see.Part III was very quick to skim, but help me understand whether I was missing any of the important APIs.In all, a good book to brush up your skills if you're a bit rusty. I can't say it contained much ground-breaking information, but it's worth reading if you're a newbie to JDBC.

I do not understand where this book fits. It's not a good reference, nor is it a good tutorial for the beginners. I wanted to know, for example, how we may know the total number of rows in the result set (which can be easily done in ASP/ADO). The book was so unorganized (and index was not sufficient) that I couldn't know where to look for. After exhaustive search, I found that the information is not there. As an appendix, the book contains JavaDoc for JDBC. From the JavaDoc, which is essentially the list of methods, I could only guess that I may use last() and getRowNumber() to get the total number of rows in the result set. But I felt that there should be a better, direct way to do this like in ASP/ADO. So, I looked at JDBC Tutorial and Reference 2nd edition, and it explained that using last() and getRowNumber() is the only way to do it. A little bit disappointed by the new version of Sun's JDBC. It introduced a lot of new functionalities in the new version, and why not this simple row counting function, which can be very popularly used on Web application (especially for paging) ? Anyway, I think that Sun's JDBC Tutorial and Reference is a much better book.