I have been delighted to receive O'Reilly's brand new edition of "Java Network Programming". This book is packed with nice tips and tricks on how to create network applications with Java 5. Once again, M. Harold has done wonders with his keyboard...

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

In a world where people and machines get more and more connected everyday, it is reasonable to consider the network as being an intrinsic part of nature. No matter whether it is wired or wireless, the network is ubiquitous and it wouldn’t be exaggerated to state that 99.9% of all human activities heavily depend on it. Take the network down and get ready to experience chaos! On one hand, such a vision might trigger the scariest nightmares. On the other hand, this massive dependence justifies that we take network concerns very seriously and adopt a mindset that forces us to consider networking as a vital aspect of any information system.

This fully revised edition includes all updates introduced by the latest Java 5 release into one of the most complete and comprehensive reference about Java network programming available today. In order to show you what kind of support Java provides for making sense of all those bytes transiting on the network, the author first discusses some basic network and web concepts and then delves into more specific topics, such as streams, threading, URIs, client and server datagrams and sockets, asynchronous I/O, protocol and content handlers, RMI, the JavaMail API, and many other attractive subjects illustrated by relevant pieces of code.

Whether you consider yourself a novice or advanced Java programmer and you are willing to build network aware applications, don't wait any further and rush to your local store. You won't regret it!

Manning made me a great favor by sending me a review copy of Erik Hatcher's and Otis Gospodnetić's latest book titled "Lucene in Action". It's amazing what you can do with that library. Moreover, it shows once again that Java is not just good for coding small applets that nobody cares about...

My 9-horseshoes review follows (soon available at Javaranch.com):

The advent of the Internet has brought the humanity to a new era where information has become the keystone of many businesses and human activities. The bad news is that the process of retrieving accurate information is often tedious and imprecise. Undoubtedly, we are all information addicts. We need relevant information and we need it now. Many companies, such as Yahoo!, Altavista, Google and some open-source movements, are striving to devise new algorithms and to create cutting edge tools whose primary goal is to ease the pain of retrieving information needles in the Internet and desktop haystacks.

This book is 100% dedicated to the Lucene search engine library, which is one of those free medications that can considerably ease your pain of providing information retrieval support. The authors, who are both committers of the Lucene project, make an outstanding job of presenting the library and describing how to incorporate it into your system in order to leverage its flexible and powerful indexing and searching capabilities.

This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on Lucene available on the bookshelves. It is targeted at developers of any level in strong need of powerful indexing and information retrieval support that can be plugged into the various lightweight and heavyweight systems they are developing. If you ever need to provide a search functionality to your users, the best advice I can give you is to grab this book and learn how to leverage Lucene's potential.

To my delight, APress sent me a complimentary copy of Rob Harrop's and Jan Machacek's latest masterpiece: "Pro Spring". Without any further comment, I'll let my review speak for itself.

My 10-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Unless you have been living in a cave somewhere over the past 18 months, you have most certainly heard of Spring, the next generation lightweight framework, which integrates numerous widely supported technologies into an elegant, well-designed and extensible infrastructure that finally makes J2EE accessible to any frustrated expert and novice developer.

Aside from its impressive set of technical features, another invaluable asset of Spring is incontestably its extensive documentation and examples suite. However, it is worth noting that this book is not a blatant clone of the provided documentation. Instead, it takes a different route in that the authors gracefully introduce Spring by adopting a very pragmatic approach based on their real-world experiences with the framework. What you will read in this book is not theory at all. You better fasten your seatbelts and get ready to see Spring at work in all its splendor. The authors spend over 700 pages showing you how to use the framework in practice when dealing with topics, such as inversion of control, data access (JDBC, Hibernate and iBATIS), AOP, transaction management, EJB, JNDI, JMS, e-mail, Struts, MVC, and many more. Once you’ll get through this book, you’ll most certainly confess that Spring truly is an impressive framework and you’ll even ask yourself how you could manage to develop your applications without it.

Finally, note that in order to get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable with both J2EE concepts and the Java platform in general as the authors deliberately stay focused on Spring and its more than welcome load of novelties. Definitely a must have for people willing to start developing seriously!!