Actually the small subtitle on the top of the front page "Regular Expressions and High-Performance I/O" would be the better title. "Java NIO" is incorrect. That suggest already that the mere 282 pages are not completely devoted to explaining usage of NIO package. The obvious conclusion is that this book is to terse to grant it the status of the sole source of information on NIO. But wait, there is more: The author feels the necessity to quote the Java package specifications, which we all have anyways on the net. This nonsensical waste of paper starts on the page 238, preceded by several pages of a similarly useless appendix B which quotes java.nio.channels.spi specifications. Thus the book has de facto approx. 230 pages.



But wait, there is more! Already on the page 151 author abandons NIO and devotes himself to a talk about regular expression package, and... in his code examples uses boldly standard java.io. His examples are of a stunning banality and simplicity, to terse to be of any use beyond the regular Java instructional trail on the net.



Regarding NIO, the 150 pages remaining, reader should rather take a look at "The JDK 1.4 Tutorial", 408 pages:

The JDK 1.4 Tutorial. Travis'es chapter 1 and 2 clearly top this text in every aspect. Hitchens code examples seem very arbitrary, and often to verbose, dealing with, or constructing something not pertinent to IO itself. For example, pages 63/65, where author suggest to "wait" in a spinning while loop for write, without any sleep (hm..., is that really necessary?) and later on wastes an entire page on assembling some arbitrary text messages or sentences of a kind. Every reader will make many more such observations.



Not a good call on O'Reilly's part... NIO is very complex indeed, and every practitioner has his/her own set of papers and snippets collected over the time, still waiting for "the ultimate" summary by someone. Last but not least, what annoys me in this book are the nonsensical and banal quotes of someone or something in the beginning of the chapters. This is a very nasty habit, copied over and over again by many authors. Only a few writers have the knowledge and ability to make such quotes, see Donald Knuth to contrast what you will find in this book. For example, "here, put this fish in you ear" by Ford Prefect. I have no clue what that means, and who or what Ford Prefect was. The said appendix with cut-and-paste of Java package specifications starts with a sentence by "U2", what ever that means. The equally useless appendix B starts with "If you build it, he will come" by... "An Iowa cornfield"! I have really no words to comment on this nonsense.



Now let me pack the "NIO users manual" and ship it back to Amazon. Give me my money back!