Book Pyre

I had several false starts when trying to learn Java. Unfortunately this book was one of them. I have never been a fan of language books that attempt to teach you the language by picking some random application and having you slowly write it throughout the book. The reason is because (1) if you don’t like the program, it make it hard to stay motivated and (2) no one program really acts as a good example for every library, function, class, technique, etc that the book is trying to teach you, so it always seems really forced in places.

In this case the sole purpose of this book is to build a “windows paintbrush” clone program in Java. Now I am firmly of the opinion that world does not need another bad drawing program, and certainly not one that saves everything in an XML format (good God, yuck). Not until O’rielly’s Learning Java book did I find what I was looking for and actually learned Java well enough to use it.

This book will likely appeal to those primarily wishing to use Java to build GUIs. As I have never enjoyed building GUIs in any language, nor to I plan to in the future, this book was not for me.