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An important part of the books and articles from the community's point of view, is which versions of the components they cover. Hopefully we can outline these here.
Opinion of HenriYandell
As a fervent buyer of technical books, especially open-source ones, I have a lot of opinions when it comes down to these books. Take the following with a grain of salt, especially as they are based on memory and personal view:
- Christian's book is not solely focused on Commons, but is instead about programming in general, with Commons as a focused set of examples. This book came out quietly and seems academic in nature; useful for teaching a class I'd suspect.
- Harshad's book was the first out that I would consider a real Commons book. I was one of the technical reviewers, and so a large pinch of salt should apply here. I think the book is very good for anyone with little Commons experience, with nice examples and a good wide coverage of Commons components.
- I'm drooling at the thought of Tim's book. The Commons and Cookbook concepts suit each other very well and I think this is a possible classic. Very well suited to any fans of the Perl Cookbook or people with some experience of Commons already I am going to guess (currently reading this).
- My school-German is too weak nowadays to understand Torsten's book. It's niche is quite clear, though whether a speaker of German and English would prefer it, I don't know.
- I've yet to read Will's book from Prentice Hall.
- I've never read a SourceBeat book, so have little clue on Jonathan's text. It's been coming-soon for almost a year now it seems though, which has been dissapointing. The blog is interesting, and suggests Jonathan will be focusing on a smaller set of components than I would expect. One advantage of the SourceBeat approach is that we're promised updates to the text on a subscription model. So when released, it should stay more up to date on versions of the components than other books.
- Vikram's series of articles at onjava.com were probably the first piece of text on Commons as a whole to be published. His forthcoming book will join Harshad's as a standard style text on Commons. I've draft-reviewed this one too, so more salt. The diffentiating factor for me here is the author's style; Harshad's better suits inexperienced developers, while Vikram is more efficient. Vikram's is available online at Manning as an e-book, or as individual chapters instead of in the paper format.
So in summary:
- Christian's: Teachers.
- Harshad's: Newbie->Intermediate Java developers.
- Tim's: Current users of Commons.
- Jonathan's: Subscription model.
- Vikram's: Intermediate->Experienced Java developers.
- Torsten's: German text.
- Will's: <to-come>
(/End of Opinion)
Third Party Resources
- Morph - alpha framework based on ideas from BeanUtils (read comparison to Morph), CommonsConvert and CommonsChain. Also will support functionality in read comparison to Morph] ([http://morph.sourceforge.net/alternatives/jexl.html).
- Mailing list archive - Nabble hosts a combined user/dev archive of the commons' lists. The archvie has a clean UI for cross browsing and also a fast search. Users can search here before posting questions to the mailing lists.