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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Book Review - NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook


It took a long time, but finally here it is. I was asked to review "NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook" by Rhawi Dantas from Packt Publishing and it took me more time than expected to finish, due to too many other tasks at hand (JavaOne anyone?). First things first - having read through the book I actually think the title is a bit unfortunate, since it suggests content you may not find in there. Reading "Cookbook" in the title I assumed to see "recipes" how to solve problems that the everyday user encounters. But in fact I think it somehow feels more like a tutorial - not that this is a bad thing - I was just thinking about consumers expectations. So, with this book being more of a tutorial, what is the target audience? Well thinking about the stuff I read in there I would suggest it to be a good pick for new or not advanced users. An intermediate user is someone who only knows about parts of the IDE, e.g. SE stuff not EE. If you are using NetBeans in your day job for more than 2 years I would assume you will not find so many new things in there.



So is this book for you? If you are new to NetBeans and want a thorough introduction without reading multiple tutorials, which are available from the NetBeans project homepage, this book may be for you. The tutorials may be more detailed, but I think I like the all-in-one experience of the book. So probably start with "recipes" in the book and if you like what you see dig in deeper using the tutorials from the NetBeans homepage.

You are expecting a rating? Well for new NetBeans users I think it is well above average, for advanced and experienced users it is probably a bit below (depends on your IDE usage patterns I think).

So, what is covered in this book? It is a broad range starting with a quick intro, moving on to the core features of the IDE. One chapter explicitly looks into Matisse, the NetBeans UI design tool. The obligaotry JEE things are in there, as well as a nice primer for how to use JDBC inside NetBeans. The chapter about JavaFX is already outdated, an introduction to mobile development is available. I really like the chapter about refactoring Java code (stay tuned NetBeans users - Jackpot will be back...). What I did not expect after the first few chapters is to have information about extending the IDE (simple but good) and about profiling (although there is more to it than written in the book). Finally there is a good intro into the usage of version control systems with NetBeans (reminder GIT is now available as well).

Anymore to say about the book? ... No, I think this is good - so get the book, if you want to learn NetBeans!

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Upcoming Book Review - NetBeans IDE 7.0 Cookbook

I am currently reviewing

Looks good so far - more details to come - stay tuned.

Presenting Cool and Fun Sessions at JavaOne 2011

With no sessions selected for JavaOne 2010, I thought I would try a new approach:

Build proposals around things I would attend at Javaone.

Well, to say the least - it worked out, probably too good. So here is the official list

Session 23923 - JVM Language Mashup Using NetBeans RCP
Session 24027 - Setting Sail: Opening New Horizons in RCP Development
Session 24034 - Next-Generation UI: JavaFX 2.0 and Scala?!
Session 24822 - The Final Frontier: Rich Client Platform with JavaFX 2.0
Session 25026 - The Enterprise RCP: NetBeans RCP with JavaFX 2.0 Controls

Anything in there that attracts your attention?
Anything you would like to see in there?

See you at J1- or stay tuned for further details on the sessions....

Reviving my Blog

After a real long time with no activity on this blog, I think it is time to get busy again. New things coming up, new technologies to evaluate...

So if you are interested in


there may some interesting blog posts in my queue.

Welcome back and stay tuned...