::Manning vs. O'Reilly:: [/tech/books] (10:54)

Eric Burke asks "Is Manning the new O'Reilly?" It's an interesting question that was starting to be asked a lot right before the tech book market busted a few years. Had the tech book market not died, it's quite possible Manning would have eclipsed O'Reilly, but they haven't. Still, Manning sits there quietly pushing out one good book after another, and their reputation among developers continues to increase.

I really like both publishers. I've written one book for Manning and one for O'Reilly. I've tech reviewed books for both publishers. And, of course, I've been an avid consumer of books from both publishers. So, where do the publishers stack up?

O'Reilly still holds the premier tech publisher spot. I'm sure in marketshare, they are still well on top, but they do seem to be losing mindshare and far fewer people think of them as THE tech publisher. I regularly pass over O'Reilly books on the shelves in favor of other publishers, something that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Why?

First, O'Reilly has embraced the mass market. I have no doubt that this has been a very profitable decision. I don't hold it against them in the least, but when a publisher is defined by intro books like the Head First series and light-tech like the Hacks book, is it any wonder that the hardcore techie doesn't consider them to be their publisher anymore?

Manning, on the other hand, primarily publishes in-depth technical books aimed at experienced developers and those who aspire to be experienced developers. Looking at the front page, I see books about technologies like Groovy, Hibernate, iText, EJB3, Spring. (I picked those because I've read or reviewed all of them - though I've only seen a few chapters of the last one - and know that they are all solid books) This is a publisher that reaches out to developers and says "Look! We've got what you are looking for!" O'Reilly doesn't.

Another reason I feel O'Reilly is losing their voice is that O'Reilly now feels like a technology promoter. You often get the feeling that they are trying to sell new, hot technologies than simply being an impartial publisher providing tech information. Manning has exactly the opposite feeling. Manning, on the other hand, just seems to impartially publish any technical topic that it feels there is a market demand.

The final difference I've noticed is that O'Reilly comes off as a bit clickish. My experience is that it is very difficult for authors to get O'Reilly to pay attention to them if they don't already have a relationship to O'Reilly. My personal experiences aside (as obviously I was able to get a book published) is that many would-be authors are unable to get anyone at O'Reilly to talk to them. Several of them have gone on to publish successful books with other publishers, including Manning. Manning, on the other hand, is very willing to work with anyone they feel can write a quality book. It does help to know the right people, but it's not a pre-requisite to being taken seriously. This seems to make a huge difference in book quality, because Manning seems to be really good about getting new authors who are passionate about a technology. That really shows.

So, that's my take on why Manning seems to be meeting the needs of the hardcore developer better than O'Reilly. It's such a small niche that I don't think they'll ever displace O'Reilly as king of the hill. Fortunately, they don't really need that to be successful.

As a side note, this may seem that I'm down on O'Reilly. I'm not. I love O'Reilly, and I like a lot of the books they are producing. I just don't think they are meeting the needs of the technical users the way they used to.

::JBoss notebook price error at Amazon:: [/tech/books] (17:20)

I've been trying not to be too blatant about promoting my books here, but I noticed that Amazon has the wrong price for JBoss: A Developer's Notebook. The cover price is $29.95, but they have it listed as $20.95, which yields an Amazon price of $14.25. That's significantly cheaper than you will find it anywhere else. If you've been on the fence about picking up a copy, now is your chance to get one cheap.

::JBoss book giveaway at JavaRanch:: [/tech/books] (09:24)

It's time for another JavaRanch book promotion. Sam and I will be in the JBoss forum all week answering questions. At the end of the week, JavaRanch will send copies of the book to a few participants.

If you have any questions about the book, or if you want to chat about JBoss in general, we'll be there. I've been doing a lot of EJB3 work recently, and I'm particularly interested in talking about what JBoss is doing there.

I'm actually in LA this week teaching a JBoss class, so I'll only be answering questions in the morning/evening. Sam should be there all day. Come say hi.

::JavaOne bestsellers:: [/tech/books] (18:05)

One of the more interesting aspects of the conference for me has been the bookstore. I've been waiting to see the first copies of the JBoss Notebook on the shelves. It's an ego thing, for sure, but it was sure nice to see the book finally for sale.

I've had high hopes for the book, but I hadn't expected it to be one of the top books at the conference. The bookstore publishes a best seller lists and my two JBoss books were solidly in the top 10, at least after the first couple days. With

Hibernate in Action also in the top 10, JBoss has 3 of the top 10 books this year. That's very cool.

There are several Spring books on the bestseller list too. I am happy to see Craig's Spring in Action leading the pack. Craig is a great author, and I'm glad to see his book getting out.

Seeing Swing Hacks near the top of the list was a surprise. I'm not knocking the book in any way, but I didn't know there was such a big market for Swing books out there.

For anyone who is interested, here's the full list, in order:

• Java Puzzlers
• Swing Hacks
• Hello World(s): From Code to Culture
• Maven: A Developer's Noteboo
• Head First Design Patterns
• Hibernate in Action
• JBoss 4.0: The Official Guide
• JBoss: A Developer's Notebook
• Spring in Action
• Java Language Specification, 3rd Edition
• Refactoring to Patterns
• Spring Live
• Killer Game Programming in Java
• J2EE Development Without J2EE
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere

::JBoss: A Developer's Notebook:: [/tech/books] (14:36)

I've been fairly silent for the last few months. That's because I've been working on an O'Reilly book for the last 4 months: JBoss: A Developer's Notebook. Sam and I finished the book last month and are expecting to have it in print by the end of June.

I think the Developer's Notebook series is really interesting. The books are small, focused and cheap.

I've been very vocal that small books are better than big books, but so far I've managed to produce two 600 page monster books. That's a far cry from the 300 page $30 baseline I called for. The notebook format, however, is exactly that.

The notebooks are more than just a smaller page count and cheaper cover price. They are about getting rid of all the blah blah blah and sticking to presenting the minimal information required to get working with something. It was challenging because I like to spend a lot of time going over concepts before getting to the tech. The first chapter of XDoclet in Action is a good example of this. I wanted to give the reader a firm grasp of what code generation is and where XDoclet fit in the bigger picture before jumping into the details. I really love that type of writing, and readers have consistently said that the intro material in the book was one of the best things about the book. Yet, there's no room for that in a developer's notebook. The notebooks are about getting your hands dirty quickly.

I think that's very useful for a JBoss book. Instead of trying to sell you on the JBoss architecture or explain why a modular lightweight container like JBoss makes sense, we just show you how to work with JBoss. It's tough to explain everything you could possibly want to know about an application server in 200 pages, but I think we did a good job of picking the important things you need to know. If you are using JBoss now, or planning to, take a good look at the book. I think you'll like it.

::XDoclet in Action - in action:: [/tech/books] (17:54)

I was looking around at Amazon today and noticed that they have a new test feature where customers can upload their "in action" shots of products. It's sort of like the Think Geek action shots. To test it out, I uploaded a picture of the first copy of XDoclet in Action I saw on the shelves. (yeah, I've posted it before)

It's actually kind of neat to see how it works, but I'd like a few more pictures. So, I'll make a challenge. If you have a copy of the book, then take a dumb picture with it and post it to Amazon. (just go to the book page click on the "Share your own customer images" section) If you email me, I promise to add your name to the acknowledgments of either the next version of the book (if we do an XDoclet 2 book) or in the book I'm working on now for O'Reilly. (I'm not announcing the title yet, but I will soon)

::Free virus books:: [/tech/books] (13:40)

When I was at UT , we were fortunate enough to have a campus book store with a world class technical book selection. (this was in the days before the University Co-Op sold out the students to Barnes and Nobles) I lined my shelves with odd technical books, especially books about security and cryptography.

Two of my most treasured books were The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses and it's sequel The Giant Black Book of Computer Viruses. Both books explained in great detail some of the virus techniques that were common at the time. I learned quite a bit from them, and they helped shape my thinking about security greatly. That's partly why I appreciate the UNIX security model and the Java security model as much as I do. More than anything, my budding libertarian side really appreciated that useful information like that could be published without being censored.

So, I'm really happy to discover that both books are now available as free PDF downloads from the publisher. Obviously the information in both books is too old to be useful as anything but historical purposes, but I do recommend downloading them if you are curious about how viruses work

I also notice that Mark has a more recent book, The Little Black Book of Email Viruses. I'm going to order a copy of that one later to support the author.

::Java Reflection in Action:: [/tech/books] (12:26)

My copy of Java Reflection in Action finally arrived. I'm really happy to see the book in print, for several reasons. First, it was my first time to tech review a book. I've been a reviewer for a dozen or so titles in the last year or two, but this was my first time to do a tech review. It was a lot of fun. I even learned a few things in the process, like the highly embarrassing lack of knowledge about class literals for primitive and array types.

I'm also happy to see the book out because the authors (Ira and Nate Forman) are both local Austinites. While Austin isn't really a tech author mecca, we do have at least a few notable Java authors like Bruce Tate and Michael Yuan in town. It's nice to have a couple more in the club. (yeah, I know this is really just a way to stroke my own ego, but hey)

I can't really pretend to be able to give an unbiased review, so I'll simply give some of my thoughts. The topic of reflection is an odd one to write a book on. Either you know how to use the reflection APIs or you don't, right? Well, to some degree this is true. The first half of the book explains the basic APIs in enough detail that a new Java programmer would be able to get them: method invocation, field access, dynamic proxies, stack traces. At that point, the book gets a bit more advanced, looking briefly at classloading and (static) code generation. These sections aren't about code generation and classloading as much as about how reflection can be used in these contexts. I think everyone should read chapter 9 on measuring the performance of reflection. It definitely made me rethink how I test the performance of small changes.

I also highly recommend paying attention to the book for it's perspective on meta-objects and meta-classes. I'm almost tempted to say that it brings a sort of academic formalism to the topic of reflection, but I don't want to scare anyone away from the book because of that. Instead, I'll say that if you want to see reflection as something bigger than just some API calls, Reflection in Action can give you that perspective. (not surprising, given Ira's previous book Putting Metaclasses to work)

If there's any down note to the book, it's that it stops at basic reflection and doesn't go on to the post-reflective bytecode transformation world we live in now. I won't fault the book for being short and focussed on the topic it's chosen to address. While some of the examples might seem old-school, they do their job well.

So, do I recommend the book? I wouldn't have been associated with the project if I didn't think it was a good book. If you are new to reflection, this book is a very good intro. Similarly, if you work with reflective code and want the bigger picture of what is going on, or if you just want some new uses for reflection, this book is great. I recommend checking it out.

::Review: Effective XML :: [/tech/books] (00:41)

I didn't notice Effective XML when it first came out, but we were lucky enough to get a review copy for the Austin XML group. I had just enough time to read the first chapter or two before I had to pass it along to the actual reviewer. But I liked the book enough to buy it, and then I put it in my book queue and forgot about it. I'm really mad I didn't get back to it faster because the book is excellent.

Effective XML is a collection of about 50 tips for working with XML. Although XML seems is simple and easy to use, it's also easy to get wrong. I've often scratched your head and wondered why things like XML Schema, for example, just doesn't feel right. But it wasn't until I read Effective XML that I understood what was really akward with it.

Because the book is so diverse (any amazing feat considering the small page count), it is hard to single out any specific part as being a reason to read the book. The book doesn't just talk about schemas, the infoset, etc..., it digs down and really explains what is good and bad about the technologies and what the best ways to apply them are. All I can say is that I use XML day in and day out and have learned everything I know by trial an error. I've made many mistakes along the way. I've tried my best to learn from them, but Effective XML was the book that made everything click for me. The best part is that the book went well beyond just helping me see my errors. I've already applied some of the ideas to new work I've done recently and have been able to head off some of the problems I would have encountered.

Effective XML is by far the best XML book I've ever read, and quite possibly the best tech book I've read all year. I might even have to add it to my favorite tech books list. If you work with XML to any significant degree, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

::My imaginary Java developer friends:: [/tech/books] (15:30)

I've noticed an annoying trend in technical books I've been reading lately. More and more books are taking the approach of inventing fictional developers and companies as examples. Joe, Mary and Bob are all developers at FooBaricus Inc working on GenericApp. Joe wanted to do X, but Mary suggested Y. The team ultimately decided on Z. It's like a geek soap opera. Tune in for next week's exciting episode of "As the code compiles".

I find that style to be extremely annoying. I don't care about Joe or Mary or about FooBaricus Inc, and being inundated with useless details about them is distracting. I'd rather focus on the technology and how I can apply it to my problems, without having to juggle additional set up details which don't add anything to the overall message.

I'd like to make a plea to all my fellow authors out there. Unless it actually adds to the technical message in some concrete way, please keep your imaginary friends to yourself and focus on the technical content of your books.