Friday April 04, 2008
Friday April 04, 2008
John O'Conner: Best Technical Writer in the World?
I am a big fan of John O'Conner's writing. He has a blog on java.net and he also has a number of articles in other places. Below follow 3 reasons why I believe he is "the best technical writer in the world":
- Very detailed technical knowledge, coupled with great didactic skills, and a wonderful clarity with words. Two articles I'd like to mention as evidence here are these:
- Creating Extensible Applications With the Java Platform
- Synchronizing Properties with Beans Binding (JSR 295) Synchronizing Properties with Beans Binding (JSR 295)
These two articles I have personally found extremely useful. In the first case, he's the first person to have written an article that uses an actual, downloadable, example to contrast the JDK's java.util.ServiceLoader class against the NetBeans API org.openide.util.Lookup class. Currently, I believe that that article is (by far) the best place to begin when you're learning about the NetBeans Lookup class (even though the code is outdated, specifically, it is relevant for 5.5, though it still works in 6.0+, although from 6.0 onwards, the Lookup code has been simplified).
The second article is excellent too: first, you find out, by means of actual code, what life is like WITHOUT beans binding. Then, he goes into detail about the beans binding framework, what it can give you, again using fully compilable code throughout.
On both these topics, I'd recommend the above two documents before any other. They ooze the air of having been written FOR programmers BY a programmer, which is not always the case.
- Concern for the customer and a common sense approach to stuff in general. He has some great blog entries where he shares conversations he's had with people about some technology or other:
I like the approach taken in those blog entries very much.
- Honesty. Even though he likes NetBeans IDE (another big plus in my book) he is honest about its failings when he finds them, such as in his recent blog entry NetBeans 6.1, UTF-8 encoded source files, and a tale of corruption.
On top of that, he has big name recognition and trust in the developer community, which you can see by the fact that he gets LOTS of comments to his blog entries. So, here's to John O'Conner!
Apr 04 2008, 06:38:36 AM PDT Permalink
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