The Open Source Zone

So I have had this book a little over a year and I come back to it time and again rather than going to the JC online docs. The book is reasonably well written but the subject matter is stellar. I am confident that using JC has given me increased confidence in my own projects and saved me countless hours of work. If you find yourself using other components that require the JC jars [Spring, XFire etc] and you are not using them yourself already, don't you think you could. Get the book and improve your code.

If you want a in-depth, head's down, nuts and bolts explanation of the Commons components, this is NOT the book for you. Doesn't even discuss some of the more powerful features of the Collections component such as Predicates and Closures.

As for the other stuff, a lightweight overview, at best.

Easy to use book, very clear examples. I now have better understanding of Jakarta Commons. Thanks Harshad Oak.

Jakarta Commons have done a superb job of harnessing the collective intellect and know-how of the great group of contributors who build them. I found Pro Jakarta Commons to be a great introduction to the commons classes. If you are like most working programmers,you will most likely need to use a few features in commons before you know much about them. Not only does the book do a very nice job of organizing the classes and methods in all of the commons packages, but more importantly, it gives you excellent examples to use many of them.

Mr. Oak does an amazing job of "getting down" on this material. Diagrams, tables and lots and lots of Java code examples make this handy and a valuable keeper of a book. By definition, once a common package leaves the sand box and becomes production ready, they strive to keep the interface backward compatible so these examples will serve you a good long while. It's also a very good read should one want to go cover to cover as the writing is clear and has that "just right" balance of simplicity and detail.

This is a must have book for Java Developers. I already have found many components/code that I can reuse to make my life easier. For example, the File Upload component is simple to use and saves a great amount of coding. The XML component (Digester) is fantastic! The author writes to the point and shows great examples. The examples on the Jakarta Commons website are lacking, so this is why this book is needed!