This book is an excellent source for most aspects of Japan's foreign policy. It is an excellent place to start when researching the policy orientation of Japan. The sections are broken up into diplomatic style, economics, securiy, regional relations, and new trends. Unlike other books which deal with only a particular field, usually economics, Curtis makes sure to combine all aspects of Japan's foreign policy. However, in its quest to be all-encompasing it is is still hihg-quality and each section is written be specialists in that particular field. The author's of the individual articles are elequent and make cogent arguments with excellent data to back their assertions. Overall, this book is a must read for anyone curious about Japan's foreign policy or even an "expert" in the field.

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I have a few points to make:

1. This publication came late in the game. In most installations that I consulted for, more sophisticated and advanced J2EE Patterns and Strategies were developed. It's too little, too late...

2. It's not an easy thing to write a book about Best Practices, Design and Strategies. The authors did not step up to the task. Patterns and Strategies are often mixed in the book. The authors were not able to explain what Patterns and/or strategies are.

3. The Strategies that the book represents are often being described as "What NOT to do" rather than "What to do". It's a very poor way of representing software strategies. Strategies writing should demonstrate a strong leadership in the field, which did not come across here.

4. Most of the code examples in the first part of the book are presented with JSP code: the book suggests to separate Logical layers from Presentation layers. Most of the samples to support this idea are brought by JSP code, the logical layer is ignored. In addition, the Controller idea is presented by JSP code, where a Controller should be a logical layer.

5. I found a weak link, in the book, between UML and Patterns. This is a very confusing topic...

6. The code examples throughout the book demonstrate poor code style and this is for itself a bad practice. They are function oriented and not object oriented in most cases.

Overall it's a very good book. It covers many of the design level patterns of J2EE applications.

Many of the previous reviews have covered everything good about the book, I do agree with most of them. I particularly like part 2 of the book - "Design Considerations, Bad Practices and Refactoring".

However, the book also left a few things to be desrired (at least IMO):

1) The Consequences of pattern should have been cleared marked as pros and cons, together with trade-off discussions

2) The last chapter "J2EE Patterns Applied" is way too light
3) I'm not so comforatable of the authors' using of the word "strategy": IMO, calling them "Implementation Variants" would be more appropriate
4) Some of the UML diagrams (especially class diagrams) are rather weak, even confusing at times
5) Lack of discussion of the high level architectural patterns, e.g. MVC

Overall it's still a excellent book, definitely worth reading! Considering there are so many rush/not-well-thought tech book out there, I certainly have no problem giving it 5 stars.

This work provides key design idioms for the J2EE platform, and therefore promotes the maturity of the platform for serious architects and designers.

The 15 patterns are presented clearly, delineated into logical tiers (6 presentation, 7 business and 2 "integration" tier) together with well-reasoned rationale. There is also a refactoring session which, although not comprehensive, provides a road-map for moving existing implementations to this pattern-oriented new world.

I would expect this work to become synonymous with well-architected J2EE systems, and perhaps to provide the motivation for architectural review of existing systems. In particular these patterns provide obvious advantages for reuse and maintainability. At the very least they provide a common grammar for communicating design concepts.

The sample source code is useful as a starting point on its own.

This book has never received much attention, but it is a solid algorithmic introduction to graphics algorithms. Fundamental 2D techniques and 3D techniques are covered, lucidly and with clear (black-and-white raster) images. An ideal textbook for an intro graphics calss.