Does this sound familiar? You know Java well enough to write standalone applets and applications, even multithreaded ones, but you know next to nothing about the language's networking capabilities. And guess what — your next job is to write a network-centric Java program. Java Network Programming serves as an excellent introduction to network communications generally and in Java. The book opens with information on network architectures and protocols and the security restrictions placed on applets. Quickly, the author gets to the meat of networked Java with a complete elucidation of the InetAddress class, the URL-related classes, applet-specific networking methods, and sockets. The author also covers packets, Remote Method Invocation (RMI), and servlets.

The one serious shortcoming of this book is that it does not include a companion disk, which is the case with most O'Reilly books. You'll have to visit the publisher's FTP site for the code if you dislike typing the examples manually. On the whole, though, this is an excellent tutorial that will guide you through the world of Java networking as smoothly as possible.