Java I/O

The basis of Java is to make hard things easy and easy things impossible. And among one of these impossibilites is standard I/O.After having tried almost every single I/O class in Java and having been only able to get FileReader and FileWriter to work successfully, I decided to buy this book. I was afraid that I would get it and it would be so technical that only people who wear pocket protectors as their standard gear would be able to read it, but this was not a problem. Mr. Harrold was perfectly willing to lay everything out just as clearly as was physically possible, while at the same time still giving an equal amount of importance to examples.Other reviewers seem to have viewed this as a weakness in the book, but personally, I would say that having an extra 50% percent of stuff you will never need is better than only having half of what is necessary to accomplish anything.Due to my having bought this book, in the last month I have gone from basic file reading and writing, building my own file reader with a readLine() method of my own make since Sun's is buggy, to internet connections to having most recently written a proxy that logs all events that go on in my internet browser by concurrently handling six I/O operations(an in from the internet to two outs to my browser and log file, and an in from my browser to the two outs of the internet and my log file.) And I say this not to boast my prowess, but to show you just how valuable this book is to anyone who will be doing any Java programming that involves I/O.

I had been using Java without really comprehending Java's approach to I/O. Other books never really explained what was going on to the extent that I could ever trust myself to write I/O code without having a book open.This book clearly explains the theory and practice of Java I/O, and all the various features. It's the second most valuable Java book I own (Java in a Nutshell being the most frequently used). The book has led me to trying out facilities (such as compression and number formatting) that I otherwise shunned because of poor descriptions.

I'm a C++ programmer that has given himself a crash-course in Java for a project at work. If I had this book earlier, I would have gotten things done a lot faster. Every programmer should be familiar with input and output streams, but how many can say they know the in's and out's of Java's cryptographic streams and piped streams? If asked, could you tell the difference between a BufferedWriter and a PrintWriter? I had to use three books to accumulate the knowledge I could have gained by just reading this one book. If you are a beginning or intermediate Java programmer, don't assume you know everything about Java I/O and what it can do; check out the pearls of wisdom in this book. Needless to say, now I'm writing much better I/O-related Java code because of it, and I believe you will too.

This is an excellent book.After jumping around and reading about a third of it, I was already recommending to some of the newer Java programmers around me to pick it up and get a solid understanding of proper I/O use in Java. I very much recommend this as any Java programmer's second book. Right after learning the language itself, this book should be read followed closely by other O'Reilly titles such as Java Threads and Java Network Programming. Those three books will give an in-depth understanding of the core Java API's for any new Java programmer, and will be of use to you no matter how you are using Java.Even after three years as a Java developer, I have learned from this book. The author often presents algorithms in clear steps and follows those clear steps with a correct implementation. Because of this clear presentation, the chapter on compression left me for the first time with an understanding of not only how to use the java.util.zip.* classes but how they work. What I learned there in one reading is immediately applicable to what I am working on now. The sections on Files is full of tips on how to use them in a cross platform fashion. Every new Java programmer needs to read that chapter before their applications actually get used.I was also impressed that several I/O classes missing in the standard library which I have only recently developed myself were presented as well. The StreamCopier and the TeeOutputStream are extremely useful classes that should be incorporated in some fashion into the base API. I wish I had them a long time ago. (A hint: you can also use the TeeOutputStream as a 'Traitor' to peek at your I/O while your program is running and without affecting its execution.) If I have any complaint about this book, it is that there are not more of these types of utilities presented for use by the advanced Java programmer. However, I haven't finished the book yet, so they may still be hidden there.