Tutorial & Ebook Download

This book contains 11 chapters, 3 sections and an appendix. Additional details about the book’s organization and stucture can be found in chapter 1, section 1.5. Here is the overview.

Part 1 covers the foundations of design patterns, antipatterns and standards supporting Internet server-side development.

* Chapter 1 compares antipatterns to other industries that use similar concepts. For example, the medical industry uses preventative care (design patterns) and cures (fixes), but the best doctors diagnose the root causes like weight or stress (antipatterns). I also explain in more depth the organization of this book.
* Chapter 2 covers the base Internet standards, plus a little process: all of the things that you’ll need for server-side Java. It’s not a comprehensive tutorial, but it might let you know where you need more study.

Part 2 covers server-side antipatterns in detail. In it, I start with a poor bulletin board application, and refactor it to solve individual antipatterns
* Chapter 3 introduces the basic server-side antipatterns, and defines the Triangle design pattern common at allmystuff (now Contextual) and IBM. THe core antipattern is the Magic Servlet: a servlet that tries to do all the work.
* Chapter 4 covers the antipatterns from Java Server Pages. SInce JSP has a tag language, this chapter has a decidedly different feel.
* Chapter 5 makes a case for caching by showing that caching at multiple levels of an enterprise can improve performance by an order of magnitude.
* Chapter 6 identifies the Java problems that lead to memory leaks, and discusses troubleshooting techniques.
(more…)

To count yourself as a TEX or LATEX user, visit the TEX Users Group’s TEX Counter web site (and get a nice certificate!). There is occasionally some confusion among newcomers between the two main programs, TEX and LATEX:

” TEX is a typesetting program, originally written by Prof Knuth at Stanford around 1978. It implements a macrodriven typesetters programming language of some 300 basic operations and it has formed the core of many other desktop publishing (DTP) systems. Although it is still possible to write in the raw TEX language, you need to study it in depth, and you need to be able to write macros (subprograms) to perform even the simplest of repetitive tasks.

” LATEX is a user interface for TEX, designed by Leslie Lamport at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1985 to automate all the common tasks of document preparation. It provides a simple way for authors and typesetters to use the power of TEX without having to learn the underlying language.
Both TEX and LATEX have been constantly updated since their inception. Knuth has now frozen development of the TEX engine so that users and developers can have a virtually bug-free, rock-stable platform to work with.24 Typographic programming development continues with the New Typesetting System (NTS), planned as a successor to TEX. The LATEX3 project has taken over development of LATEX, and the current version is LATEX2e, which is what we are concentrating on here.
(more…)