The Cattle Drive forum is where the drivers get together to complain, uh rather, discuss their assignments and encourage each other. Thanks to the enthusiastic initiative of Johannes de Jong, you can keep track of your progress on the drive with the Assignment Log. If you're tough enough to get through the nitpicking, you'll start collecting moose heads at the Cattle Drive Hall of Fame.

Gettin' them doggies...
This month finished with 17 drivers busy testin' the waters and pickin' on them po' nitpickers. The Say assignment alone's been keepin' four of them from watchin' too much of that color TV while more than half of the drivers are busy with Servlets and JDBC.

Another moose on the wall for...
Yep, that's right, you make it through, you get yerself a nice little moose to hang on the wall. Well, OK, so it's a virtual moose on a virtual wall, but you can be right proud of 'em! Thanks to the efforts of Marilyn deQueiroz, you can now proudly admire your codin' accomplishments at the recently opened Cattle Drive Hall of Fame. Check it out, pardner, it's worth a wink.

This month Peter Berquist bagged his first moose on the Java Basics trail of the drive. Way to go Peter! Louise Haydu, Manju Jain, and Dirk Schreckmann each hung their third moose head up on the wall after pokin' at them nitpickers on the Servlets trail. All them poor meese... what would the WWF say?

Saddle sore...
So close and yet so far, that's how it feels when you're just about to get through one of the Cattle Drive sections. Long time driver, Carol Murphy, is about set to bag her third moose and order up some sarsaparilla at the saloon. Hang in there, cowpoke, yer almost there!

Back from being out on the range...
Sometimes long lost Cattle Drivers untangle themselves from the sagebrush and actually make it back to the Drive. Pauline McNamara found some time between nitpickin' and bicycling through Europe to take another shot at those Servlets assignments. Good luck pardner!

Nitpicking is hard work too...
We know they're workin' reeeeeally hard, after all, we've seen what those assignments look like once the nitpickers have combed through 'em. Hats off to Marilyn deQueiroz and Pauline McNamara for their dedication and patience with the pesky vermin that always manage to make their way into those assignments.

Tips for the Trail...
Java's only ternary operator - sometimes called the query-colon operator - condition ? exp1 : exp2 - just might be the thing to use in order to keep that code nice and easy to read. Like we've mentioned time and again, readability is one of the most important goals of the Cattle Drive, and for writing code in general!

Content and format adapted from Ol' Timer Pauline McNamara's original column by Dirk Schreckmann.