Amazon.com (ISBN 0471463620, Paperback)

The Java language itself is not strictly open-source (Sun has held onto control, albeit with lots of public input). There is, however, a large open-source development community around this highly capable language. Java Open Source Programming describes and provides tutorials on some of the most interesting public Java projects, and is designed to enable a Java programmer (who's worked through the basic language's initial learning curve) to take on more ambitious assignments. The authors generally treat the covered open-source packages as resources to be used, rather than projects to be contributed to, and so it's fair to think of this volume as the "missing manual" for downloaded code. In that spirit, the authors devote many sections to "how to" subjects (addressing, for example, a good way to retrieve stored objects from a database and the procedure for calling an action in XWork).

Java Open Source Programming takes a bit of a risk by devoting a lot of space to the development of a complex application (an online pet shop), as such a didactic strategy can be hard to follow. The authors pull it off, though, and manage to show that their covered technologies can be used to create a feature-rich and robust application that uses the versatile model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. This book will suit you well if you're planning an MVC Java project and want to take advantage of open-source packages. --David Wall

Topics covered: The most popular open-source Java packages, particularly those concerned with Web applications and the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. Specific packages covered include JUnit and Mocks (code testing), Hibernate (persistent storage of objects in databases), WebWork (MVC), SiteMesh (Web page layout), Lucene (site searching), and WebDoclet (configuration file generation).