Book Review: NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide

NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide written by Jürgen Petri to be honest can have "for
beginners" at the end of title. This book is designated for newbies to help them with basic tasks and
in my opinion author was successful in that task. The chapters have gently increasing difficulty, so
chapters 1-4 mostly explain some concepts to the readers. What is interesting is that book takes the
form of one big tutorial so even when I was creating my first project, that project was used to the end
of book for creating TaskManager application.

I really like style of a book, in every chapter I was learning one of main concepts of Platform and my
application gets more and more powerful. Constantly refactoring my modules makes me see better
advantages of using NetBeans Platform.

It is obvious that author knows much about NetBeans and knows how to teach. Despite great
examples. the author is always explaining them in depth. He has included many tips about real
use cases and important features of NetBeans Platform that don't match the nature of a sample
application. Of course not everything is included in book, but this is not a definitive guide.


For a little balance some flaws:
From about 4 chapter I found confusing working of application with book only. That was the time
for downloading sources from Packt website. There was some inconsistencies in what is in book
and in code, but I was using code as a compassion to my own work so this wasn't really important. I
think that code samples included in the book should be longer and clearer along with descriptions to
which file edits should be done... Once in 4 chapter, I've added some methods to wrong file and only
downloading of code makes me see what is wrong. I must say that it was impossible for me to find
what is wrong, because new application simply dies without even throwing Exceptions or a reason of
shutdown...


At a glance:
For whom: Everyone who wants to develop NetBeans Platform application.
Requirements: Java and Swing basics.
Cons: Sometimes code examples could be longer + files names to which they belong.

Rating: 9/10

I really like this book and can recommend it to anyone who wants to learn the basics of Netbeans
Platform.