Nice Firework

This book starts great, brilliant and clear, and then crushes and burns to a cold, dark, inglorious end. The first six chapters are very well written and informative. Thanks to them some pieces that were still missing from my java puzzle clicked into place nicely. Any reasonably experienced java programmer will find interesting material on the basics of reflection, manipulating fields and methods, dynamic object construction, stack trace reflection and the uses of a dynamic proxy.
I liked the choice of introducing new material with a very simple and self contained example before attempting a more complex "put it all together" example. Also, yes, the examples are quite contrieved, but that can be justified because while it's true that little bits and pieces of the reflection API can be useful in most programs, it's definitely hard to come up with an example program that gains real advantage by using ALL of the reflection API.
Starting with chapter 7 on code generation, this book takes the very sorry road of an overly academical, obscure style that is only about introducing unnecessary complications. My bet is the real reason for introducing these last chapters was to fatten up a book that even like that is quite slim. In fact it's certainly not easy to produce a 200+ pages book on reflection alone, but still the author's would have been better off introducing more examples, or even treating another subject besides reflection, than introducing these bogus chapters. Still a worthy buy though, for a java programmer that has digested the basics and is curious to find out what is possible with the apparently arcane features of reflection.

Other Reviews

• Reflect upon more flexible ways to write Java code
• Nice Firework
• Neat little guide to reflective programming
• Must have for any Java developer
• Almost great