I can easily understand how Steven Holzner manages to write so many books in so many diffent subjects.. he knows extremely little about them all, and is a master only at hiding the superficiality of his skills and knowledle.

Take this book for example. Nice cover, cool title, great overall idea for a technical book: learning advanced Java programming techniques while playing with some "unconventional" and "fun-oriented" applications..the best way to learn.. learn by doing and by doing something fun.. Too bad the author is not up to the task. The program he presents in this book are mostly horribly insignificant. To give you an idea of what I mean by that one of the projects, pompously called "weblogger" is nothing more than a simple, stinky web-app filter printing a line of text for every request to your webapp. Basically nothing more than your "hello world" filter. Just very few of the projects deserve more attention and even for those the author quicky glosses over the most interesting parts leaving you alone to figure out the code. And the code, the code.. well the level is pretty the one you would expect from a good college student who has had a couple of semester of Java programming. I understand well mr Holzner because I am kind of an eclectic learner myself, I like to study and tinker with different areas and technologies, only I don't have the "bronze face" (as we say here in Italy) to sell myself as an expert in a field where I have just superficially played.

Someone please find a decent job for this guy, so he will stop polluting the world with his books at the expense of many wasted tree and many more naive readers.

If you 're interested in some high quality, elegant, professional level java code examples give a try to:

Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

No shiny book cover, no marketing hype, no cool sounding app names but you will surely learn a lot from that book. No wonder, it's from a real tech author, not an amateur with good marketing sense.