Product Description

Many Java programmers consider the new I/O API, called NIO for New Input/Output, the most important feature in the 1.4 version of the Java 2 standard edition. The NIO package includes many things that have been missing from previous editions of Java that are critical to writing high-performance, large-scale applications: improvements in the areas of buffer management, scalable network and file I/O, character-set support, and regular expression matching. Most of all, it boosts performance and speed dramatically. This text explores the new I/O capabilities of version 1.4 in detail and shows you how to put these features to work to greatly improve the efficiency of the Java code you write. It examines the typical challenges that Java programmers face with I/O and shows you how to take advantage of the capabilities of the new I/O features. It explains how to put these tools to work using examples of common, real-world I/O problems and how the new features have a direct impact on responsiveness, scalability, and reliability. As the NIO APIs supplement the I/O features of version 1.3, rather than replace them, you'll also learn when to use new APIs and when the older 1.3 I/O APIs are better suited to your particular application. The volume includes a rundown of the new features in NIO, basic and advanced I/O concepts and binary I/O and the new buffer classes. As well as memory mapped files and file locking, Character I/O: encoding, decoding and transforming character data, regular expressions and the new java.util.regex package, and muliplexing with java.nio.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #186828 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

William Wagers, Java Guide, about.com, October 2002
Five stars. The Bottom Line: 'Java NIO' is a must read for Java programmers developing I/O intensive applications.

From the Publisher
Many serious Java programmers, especially enterprise Java programmers, consider the new I/O API--called NIO for New Input/Output--the most important feature in the 1.4 version of the Java 2 Standard Edition. The NIO package includes many things that have been missing from previous editions of Java that are critical to writing high-performance, large-scale applications: improvements in the areas of buffer management, scalable network and file I/O, character-set support, and regular expression matching. Most of all, it boosts performance and speed dramatically.

Java NIO explores the new I/O capabilities of version 1.4 in detail and shows you how to put these features to work to greatly improve the efficiency of the Java code you write. This compact volume examines the typical challenges that Java programmers face with I/O and shows you how to take advantage of the capabilities of the new I/O features. You?ll learn how to put these tools to work using examples of common, real-world I/O problems and see how the new features have a direct impact on responsiveness, scalability, and reliability. The book includes:

A rundown of the new features in NIO

Basic and advanced I/O Concepts

Binary I/O and the new buffer classes

Memory mapped files and file locking

Character I/O: encoding, decoding and transforming character data

Regular Expressions and the new java.util.regex package

Muliplexing with java.nio

Because the NIO APIs supplement the I/O features of version 1.3, rather than replace them, you?ll also learn when to use new APIs and when the older 1.3 I/O APIs are better suited to your particular application.

Java NIO is for any Java programmer who is interested in learning how to boost I/O performance, but if you?re developing applications where performance is critical, such as game computing or large-scale enterprise applications, you?ll want to give this book a permanent spot on your bookshelf. With the NIO APIs, Java no longer takes a backseat to any language when it comes to performance. Java NIO will help you realize the benefits of these exciting new features.

From the Author
Java NIO explores the new I/O capabilities of version 1.4 in detail and shows you how to put these features to work to greatly improve the efficiency of the Java code you write. This compact volume examines the typical challenges that Java programmers face with I/O and shows you how to take advantage of the capabilities of the new I/O features. You?ll learn how to put these tools to work using examples of common, real-world I/O problems and see how the new features have a direct impact on responsiveness, scalability, and reliability.

Because the NIO APIs supplement the I/O features of version 1.3, rather than replace them, you?ll also learn when to use new APIs and when the older 1.3 I/O APIs are better suited to your particular application.

Customer Reviews

Somewhat lightweight and disappointing
Information on the new, high-performance I/O classes in Java 1.4 is hard to come by anywhere so this book is welcome for providing some information, at least. It also covers the new character set and regular expression classes which, although seemingly unrelated, came from the same Java Specification Request (#51 if you're interested) and which hardly merit a book by themselves. Nevertheless, the book should be judged on its coverage of NIO, and in my opinion it fails to do this adequately. The main problem, I think, is lack of real world application. Many of the examples are trivial and / or silly (although there is a very amusing one which randomly generates frighteningly realistic marketing speak - "Harness extensible paradigms" or "leverage cross-platform functionalities"). One of the main ideas of NIO is that you're supposed to be able to manage multiple non-blocking data streams with a single thread, rather than using a thread for each incoming connection, and so reducing system resource usage as well as making your server programs more responsive. The example that Hitchens creates is a stupid echo server which simply sends its input back where it came from. Having read this, I certainly didn't feel ready to implement readiness selction myself which means that, for me at least, the book does not do what it's supposed to do. Ttip for any future edition: make the examples applicable to real world problems; that lame echo server could, with a little more work, have been turned into a simple but usable HTTP server.

An good book that opens your eyes to an excellent language
The book is not excellent but the fact
that it is the only one that opened my eyes
in this excellent part of Java it is worth the money.
The book explains the concepts with simple (but not naive)examples. The new features of Java that this book explained
made me to write an excellent Master Thesis and also to
make Java to work with an application that had to work
in Real-Time. I have a Master in Control Engineering
and also one in Computer Science and I am doing another
in Biomedical Engineering. That book was the most usefull
book in all my 9 years of graduate and postgraduate studies.
And for that it takes 5 stars.

Good
The book starts by outlining the main points well.

It has useful learning examples for each of the subject areas covered which can be read independantly from each other.