Thursday, September 22, 2011

A Review of NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook

A few weeks (actually a month+) ago, I was sent a request to review the NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook and blog about it. Incidentally, I was preaching/teaching Netbeans to a few students during the same time. So, although I thought it came at the right time, later I was travelling quite a bit and didn’t have much time to read through the book. Finally, in the last few days, I decided that I should read through the book and see what it is all about. 

The book is published by Packt Publishers and written by the Brazilian Rhawi Dantas. It is nicely arranged in terms of the chapters and the kind of details that it talks about. Starting from the basics of creating projects, importing projects, to designing GUIs, Web projects, Mobile development, Profiling and Testing… It covers most parts of the IDE pretty well.

What it lacks is the depth of coverage. Like Maven and some of the options like skipping tests is a very useful feature in Netbeans is missing from the book. Or the WSDL Editor. Or Navigation features like Go To Implementation is missing!!

In conclusion I’d say the book is interesting for beginners and slightly boring for experienced Netbeans users. If you are preparing for Netbeans Certification, then this is a book you should read, but otherwise I feel the web documentation of Netbeans is good enough to find your way through… I’d rate this book 2.5/5

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