Diamond and Plattner offer a valuable update from their 1993 book, now comprised of articles from the Journal of Democracy from 1990 through 1995. Anchored by a thorough introduction, the first section introduces the third wave of democratization, the new world disorder, and definitions and dangers of democracy. Articles on institutional choices debate the structural questions of democracy, with a broad perspective on presidential, parliamentary, constitutional and representative questions. A new section on civil society discusses an area to which political scientists are bringing renewed attention. Eight new chapters make up the cautiously optimistic section on the prospects for democracy.

A strength of this book as a teaching tool is that it offers both theory and comparative chapters. Several articles are broad-based, discussing paradoxes intrinsic to all democracies or the gap between democratic concepts and political realities, for example. Others are country- or region-specific, such as civil society in Russia or pluralism in the Arab world.

A second strength is the frequent intermixing of political, economic and cultural concerns. In many individual chapters and in the collection overall, the reader is reminded that institutions, currencies and mores do not exist or operate in vacuum. Rather, they influence and change each other -- and not always for the better. Chapters on technocratic economic emphasis in post-communist states and ethnic divisions and underdevelopment in Africa are particularly revealing.

By highlighting the research published in the Journal of Democracy, this volume offers educators a valuable collection for comparative and theoretical approaches to democratization. The readings prompted thoughtful debates among my students on the central issues. Such a fluid field depends upon regular updates, and this reviewer looks forward to using future editions. (January 2000)

Pro:

*) Covers a lot of ground on up to date (01/2000) server side tech, Servlets, JSP, RMI, XML, EJB, JINI, CORBA, JNDI, LDAP, JDBC, Mime, cookies, Internationalization.

*) Lots of hands-on details with many examples.

*) Very fluent and usually clear.

Con:

*) Very little on theory, concepts, server architecture using these technologies or trends, goes straight to the details.

*) Many exercises don't work without some hacking (they could still fix it, the code is on their site).

*) So much is about Java Servlets you would think Sun published it.

*) Not all the chapters are in the same level, you can feel many people wrote the book.

This book is one of the must-have books for anyone serious about writing server-side Java programs. Sure you can find a lot of the information on the net, but I don't think that most professionals want to rely just on the net as their only resource now do they? I've had this book for many months now and it's the most popular book at work. It's jam-packed full of good server-side programming ideas and techniques. And it covers a lot of the bases with enough depth to get you more than started.

There are over ten chapters dealing with Servlets. There is only one chapter on JSP (29 pages), but anything you need to know about JSP you can get out of that one chapter. Servlets are what you should be concerned about anyway as you are looking for a hardcore Java Server Programming book right? The chapter on Smart Servlets is a better approach than JSP anyway.

The book isn't just about Servlets, however. There's also good coverage of XML, Distributed Computing with Servlets (using RMI), and Enterprise Javabeans. And more!

Want a big bonus this year? Get this book! Want to eventually lose your job and end up at McDonalds? Don't get this book. It's nice to know you have choices. :)

Everything you need to get started with server-side Java programming is in this book. It starts off with several chapters covering Servlets, then a solid chapter on JSP, followed by coverage of JDBC, and a chapter on database connection pools. This would have been enough for a complete book, but it doesn't stop there. There is also good coverage of XML, RMI, JNDI, EJB, and more.

To me, this book is an essential reference for anyone doing server-side Java programming. It has been an invaluable resource on my current programming project. I continually recommend it to my co-workers.

The book has a good balance of example code and explanations, and the authors generally have very good writing styles which make the technical material relatively easy to understand. However, at times you can tell that the book has many authors because not all of the chapters are of the same quality. In particular, I though chapters 5 and 6 were not as well written as most of the others.

One minor criticism of the book is that even though it is over 1,000 pages it is printed in a rather small font which made it a little hard to read. I would have preferred that one or two of the less important chapters be excluded so that a normal font size could have been used.

This book is also a great value for the price. Many technical books don't cover half as much material for the same price. I highly recommend it.

Is there any hope for democracies in ethnically divided lands? This is a question that the West needs to answer, because if there isn't, aide and security policies need to be readjusted to realities, or peace will never find a permanent home. The book's highest points are two extended essays on the title topics. However, other essays cover such diverse ethnic issues as Serbia's disintegration, Nigerian tribal problems, the Quebecois of Canada, and India. This is an excellent starting point for reflection, and for comparing the book's prediction of the future as it looked in 1994. The 'stable' world must address the issues of ethnicitiy and minorities. This book clearly makes the case for that. Perhaps other books help point the directions that we might should go.