Back on Safari…
June 30th, 2003 by HenHaving almost got to the point of ending my Safari membership, I decided to instead let the company pay for it and just polished off Mac OS X for Java Geeks.
It starts very well, and I found my interest caught for the first time in a while. Indeed, I ended up reading the entire book in 5 days or so, which in today’s world of car-commuting is pretty fast for me. Back in the old days when I commuted on a train, I’d expect that to be average.
There were many interesting discoveries, there’s a whole plethora of properties which may be passed into Java on OS X. A favourite for me was the property to change the position of Swing menus from the window to the global menu bar. I’ve wanted to do that for ages. I printed the chapter on properties. It also discusses the concepts behind the Mac Java implementation and variants on how to build applications for the Mac.
The book ends poorly though. It goes from showing cool things like the Apple speech, spelling and quicktime frameworks; to describing databases, tomcat, j2ee and web services on a Mac. All pretty much stuff that a Java Geek will know. The only part that interested me was the database chapter. It discussed mysql and postgres, gave some good links and reminded me how to start/end them. I’ve grown used to /etc/init.d/mysql start.
I also had trouble getting the permissions right on the fink version of mysql, so should be fun.
All in all, this is a perfect book for Safari. Light, quick, worth reading but not worth owning. If I was being paid to do some heavy OS X Java work, I would be tempted to acquire a copy, but it wouldn’t be that long before I was beyond the book.