A website called computer-books.us provides information about computer books that are available for free download. I think the website good since it is useful for those who are seeking free online books for computer programming.

I was interested in Java so I clicked on the link to Java Programming. The website then showed me a page that contains links to 11 Java programming books. I then clicked the first link, and saw the book cover of “Enterprise JavaBean Second Edition” with the following statement on the right:

For your free electronic copy of this book please verify the numbers below.
(We need to do this to make sure you’re a person and not a malicious script)

At that point, I expected that I would download the whole electronic copy of the book after I entered the number (which is always the same number–89703) and pressed the “download” button. I went on as instructed and got to the page saying that:

You’ve been verified as a person and not a script!
To download this book, click on the title Enterprise JavaBeans
I hope you find the book useful.

I clicked the link to download a zip file, which I expected it should be the electronic copy of the book. The ending of this story is that, at the end, I just got a 2531-bytes HTML file that points to the online version of the book. At that moment, I had the feeling that I was fooled by the website.

I switched to search engines to check the other books listed in the page, and finally found that most of them had their online version only (in a volume of HTML file). Here are my one-hour work; they point to the direct links to those free Java books.

• Enterprise JavaBeans Second Edition (Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Author: Richard Monson-Haefel; ISBN 1-56592-869-5E; Second edition, published March 2000.)
• Essentials of the Java Programming Language, Part 1 (From Sun Developer Network’s Tutorial & Code Camps; Author: Monica Pawlan, March 1999)
• Essentials of the Java Programming Language, Part 2 (From Sun Developer Network’s Tutorial & Code Camps; Author: Monica Pawlan, July 1999)
• Exploring Java (Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Author: Patrick Niemeyer & Joshua Peck; 1-56592-184-271-9, 500 pages (est.) 2nd Edition July 1997 (est.)
• Introduction to Computer Science using Java (Revised and Expanded, July 2003; Bradley Kjell, Central Connecticut State University)
• Introduction to Programming Using Java (Author: David J. Eck)
• Java AWT Reference (Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Author: John Zukowski; 1-56592-240-9, 1074 pages; 1st Edition April 1997)
• Java Language Reference (Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Author: Mark Grand; 1-56592-326-X, 475 pages; 2nd Edition July 1997)
• Java Servlet Programming (Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Author: Jason Hunter with William Crawford; ISBN 1-56592-391-XE; First edition, published October 1998.)

What do you think about that?

Update: I also found the following two websites that contains a lot of online versions of O’Reilly’s books. I have no idea on why they can do that.

• www.wuppy.net.ru/books/Orelly/
• www.unix.org.ua/orelly/

There are two major standard APIs for processing XML with Java, namely, the Simple API for XML (SAX) and the Document Object Model (DOM). In addition, there are a few of other APIs that intend to address some of the drawbacks of SAX and DOM. The following lists the major websites about this topic. (more…)

I looked for some materials to aid teaching and learning of software design patterns. I wanted something suitable for students to play with during practical and tutorial sessions.

The first website I reached is Java Design Patterns Reference and Examples at FluffyCat.com. This site provides simple yet good and complete example codes for many design patterns. However, there are no detailed descriptions nor in-depth discussions.

The second website I reached is JavaWorld.com. It contains some good articles on Java design patterns. Each article (around 1,0000 in length) focuses on one design pattern at a time and has example applications with explanation and discussions. The following are what I found useful for student practical works and classroom discussions. (more…)

I found the following three search engines that are specially designed for searching program source code. They will only index and search high quality source code with every line of code literally validated. My initial observations are that Codase is the best and JExamples.com searches only open source code written in Java.

• Codase - Source Code Search Engine
• Koders - Source Code Search Engine
• JExamples.com - Search Java Examples in Open Source Code
• Codefetch

(more…)

Comprehensive lists of free Java books collected and recommended by www.KickJava.com and TechBooksForFree.com.

• Free Java books
• Free books on Java

Jeliot 3: the program animation tool

Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program. Programs can be created from scratch or they can be modifyed from previously stored code examples. The Java program being animated does not need any kind of additional calls, all the visualization is automatically generated. Jeliot 3 understands most of the Java constructs and it is able to animate them. Especial effort is currenlty being addressed to animate object oriented features, such as inheritance.

I get this when I attend a paper presentation at ICALT2005. The work is from a university of Finland.