Not all the good stuff is in these Journal articles. The Saloon sees lots of insight and wisdom all the time, and the staff is continuously reviewing interesting books and blogging about this, that and the other. Plus, we've got book authors hanging out with us all the time. So here are a few nuggets you may have missed that should prove interesting to many folks.
Big Moose Saloon
A question about how to comment code so it's understandable by other people leads to a discussion on the various ways to comment Java code -and whether it should be necessary in the first place- in How (and why) to comment code.
A rancher is asked to evaluate Maven for a project, and finds it hard to get started with. Seeing that many people swear by it, he wonders what its benefits might be. Other ranchers offer lots of insight and reasoned opinions for and against using Maven in Maven: What's the big deal?.
Contemplating vinyl records and telephones with rotary dials, a rancher wonders what else our kids just won't understand when they see it. Lots of responses in What our kids won't understand indicate that we'll have a lot of explaining to do.
Lots of interesting and informative Groovy talk is going on as we have the author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer answering questions.
Radio
Map continues her interview series in Interview with Hussein Baghdadi, a Java programmer from Syria, covering topics from Java development and working conditions to book availability and the evilness of countries.
Book Reviews
Murach's Java Servlets and JSP by Andrea Steelman and Joel Murach
Enterprise AJAX by David Johnson, Alexei White and Andre Charland
Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck
Next Generation Java Testing by Cedric Beust and Hani Suleiman
Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects by Ian Roughley
Upcoming Promotions
On April 8, Venkat Subramaniam will be answering questions about Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer
On April 15, Binildas A. Christudas introduces Service-Oriented Java Business Integration
On April 22, Adam Myatt talks about Pro NetBeans IDE 6 Rich Client Platform Edition