Better than Herbert Schildt's Tiger Book

This book does a good job of getting a reader well versed in Java 1.4 up to speed with Java 1.5's (Tiger's) new features. As noted, I believe this book does a better job of doing this over Herbert Schildt's book (Java 2 v5.0 (Tiger) New Features).

Both books hit the main areas most people are concerned about: generics, enums, annotations, enhanced for loop, autoboxing and var args. However, I felt the O'Reilly book did a more in-depth job of describing the features with more concise explanations and examples. For example, the section on Enums in the O'Reilly book also covers EnumMap and EnumSet whereas the Schildt book does not. Both books also cover some of the lesser known enhancements such as static imports, updated Unicode support and the new Formatter class.

Each book covers some minor enhancements the other does not. Schildt: Scanner class, Integer enhancements. O'Reilly: Queue classes. The O'Reilly book does cover one big area that Schildt's does not - threading / concurrency enhancements. Though this area is not covered as completely as the other features, it is a good overview nonetheless. Any good discussion of these issues would warrant a book of its own and perhaps that's why Schildt left it out of his book. However, it was nice to see some coverage in the O'Reilly book.

I guess my only complaint with the O'Reilly book is the "notebook" style itself with the gridlines and "hand written" notes in the margins. It does require some getting used to.

Other Reviews

• Pretty Good Overview
• Compact and yet extremely informative, very useful
• Better than Herbert Schildt's Tiger Book
• Good Intro to the latest features of Java 1.5 Tiger.
• Good book to start with.