Tim Boudreau's Blog

We have a book cover - I mean, a new NetBeans book!

The last one of these I wrote was a year and a half in the making; this was a six-week fire-drill. Sometime last fall, Geertjan, who deserves full credit for making the project happen, wrote me and asked if I'd "contribute a chapter or two." Six chapters and two appendices later...well, if you're going to do something, do something :-)

I'm generally happy with the results (well, okay, I read the chapters and immediately find things I could improve, but sometimes you have to let things go). If you do download the rough cut, any feedback, suggestions, error reports or improvements are welcome - even if they don't make it into this edition they will into the next!

Probably the most fun part of writing it, oddly, was the little card game library used in the Nodes chapter (like there aren't enough of these sorts of things already!). The part that was fun was analyzing the problem (really I was just looking for a data model that people would be familiar enough that people would focus on what we were doing with the data model, not how it worked), and realizing that you can boil pretty much any card game down into piles of cards and logical rules about what cards are visible and what cards may legally be added. Not that any of that is new, but there is a certain thrill to figuring something out from first principles and taking it to its conclusion.

On a completely other note - anybody out there have any handy implementations of diff algorithms for java.util.Lists? I put some work into adding another algorithm to contrib/misc/diffs in the NetBeans source tree today - being able to simply do a diff of two lists is ridiculously valuable, but there are a lot of different algorithms with different performance characteristics - I wrote the initial version for the NetBeans Navigator component a few years ago, and kept reusing it again and again for different projects. It would be nice to collect a relatively complete set of useful algorithms - different algorithms will work better for lists that are large/non-large, tend to have large changes or small ones, etc. I found a couple of examples buried in Apache projects, but nothing that sets out to just do this one particular thing well. IMO such a facility would really be a useful addition to the JDK.

Comments

• 
  I've read the book already and it was great. Of course, there are always things you'd like to fit in, but finally having a modern, cohesive book that explains the NetBeans platform in a way that a beginner/intermediate user will understand is a big win for Java developers. I really look forward to answering questions like "This looks cool, but is there a book that explains this stuff.." on the openide mailing list with "as a matter of fact, there is."

  Congratulations to you, Geertjan, Jaroslav and everyone else who made it happen!
  

  Posted by: tomwheeler on February 28, 2007 at 09:24 PM

• Excellent, well done ... just wish I could have had this 2 years ago.

  Posted by: luano on March 06, 2007 at 09:09 AM

• I am reading the book, but I don't find the samples (i.e. the card game library). The samples' code is available?
  

  Posted by: itelleria on March 14, 2007 at 02:23 AM

• This is more whimsey than work. I Googled to check if there is a Costco near Prague, and your entry from 2005 confirmed there is. Very helpful. I thought you might like to read a different take on your city, from a visit I made with a Benedictine monk. The story reads up from Vienna in the thread. http://mapeel.blogspot.com/search/label/Vienna%2FPrague%2FBudapest

  Posted by: mapeel on March 23, 2007 at 10:48 AM

• I've read the book already and it was great. Of course, there are always things you'd like to fit in, but finally having a modern, cohesive book that explains the NetBeans platform in a way that a beginner/intermediate user will understand is a big win for Java developers. I really look forward to answering questions like "This looks cool, but is there a book that explains this stuff.." on the openide mailing list with "as a matter of fact, there is."
  

  Posted by: davidcomass on May 20, 2007 at 04:47 AM

• davidcomass, thanks for your post. Be aware that it included about 500 porn URLs after the text you wrote. I deleted those, but I'm guessing you have a virus on your system.

  Posted by: timboudreau on May 20, 2007 at 12:35 PM

• I'm so grateful for all that you've done. Thanks again for that nice essay and I would be most grateful if you would send me the latter ones....

  
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  Posted by: mhsin on June 20, 2008 at 09:44 AM

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