The subtitle of this book says it'll teach you the 15 essential skills of JBuilder.
Yet if you look inside, no less than 21 skills are actually covered, mainly JBuilder IDE skills.
Borland's JBuilder - No Experience Required is a learn-by-doing book, which will show you every step of using, tweaking and turning JBuilder's IDE to your advantage.
Even if you've worked with JBuilder before, I'm sure there will be areas of the IDE that you just didn't examine before (and this book will).
The book consists of three major parts.
In the first part, we even learn how to install JBuilder, the very basics of Java programming, applets and applications, and the JBuilder IDE.
The second part is about JavaBeans: what they are, how they work, and how we can make them using the JBuilder environment.
The third part is most about JBuilder's IDE itself: showing how to customise it and use it to its full potential.
While you don't really need to have previous Java experience, it doesn't hurt to have some.
The book doesn't attempt to teach you Java in detail, but leaves that to more dedicated Java (reference) books like O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell, 2nd edition" (see review elsewhere in this magazine).
There's also no CD-ROM in the book, but you can get the source code examples from the publisher's website at http://www.sybex.com.
If you're unhappy with the (electronic) documentation provided by Borland about using JBuilder, or if you're just looking for a book to get started with JBuilder, then this book may be perfect for your needs.
(Bob Swart)
