Page History

...

• Christian's book is not solely focused on Commons, but is instead about programming in general, with Commons as a focused set of examples. This book came out quietly and seems academic in nature; useful for teaching a class I'd suspect.
• Harshad's book was the first out that I would consider a real Commons book. I was one of the technical reviewers, and so a large pinch of salt should apply here. I think the book is very good for anyone with little Commons experience, with nice examples and a good wide coverage of Commons components.
• I'm drooling at the thought of Tim's book. The Commons and Cookbook concepts suit each other very well and I think this is a possible classic. Very well suited to any fans of the Perl Cookbook or people with some experience of Commons already I am going to guess (I've not seen any form of the text for this yet).
• I've never read a SourceBeat book, so have little clue on Jonathan's text. It's been coming-soon for almost a year now it seems though, which has been dissapointing. The blog is interesting, and suggests Jonathan will be focusing on a smaller set of components than I would expect. One advantage of the SourceBeat approach is that we're promised updates to the text on a subscription model. So when released, it should stay more up to date on versions of the components than other books.
• Vikram's series of articles at onjava.com were probably the first piece of text on Commons as a whole to be published. His forthcoming book will join Harshad's as a standard style text on Commons. I've draft-reviewed this one too, so more salt. The diffentiating factor for me here is the author's style; Harshad's better suits inexperienced developers, while Vikram is more efficient.
• My school-German is too weak nowadays to understand Torsten's book. It's niche is quite clear, though whether a speaker of German and English would prefer it, I don't know.
  

So in summary:

• ChristanChristian's: Teachers.
• Harshad's: Relative newbies to Java.
• Tim's: Current users of Commons.
• Jonathan's: Subscription model.
• Vikram's: Experienced Java developers.
• Torsten's: German text.

...