Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Review by The Dining Philosopher

iText in Action was reviewed by John Griffin (author of "Hibernate Search in Action")

Opinion
This book is a rewrite of the first edition. When this reviewer first started the book and read what the author had done with it compared to the first edition he was a little worried that interested readers might have to buy both books in order to completely understand the iText library and API. After reading deeper into it you can rest assured that this is not the case. iText beginners will have no problem understanding the API.

[...]

In this reviewer's previous work experience there were many copies of the first edition on the desks of report developers. This is one of the most important niches for iText. Yes, there are more pieces of PDF generation software out there today than you can count but their problem is that they are very difficult to automate for on demand, detailed, ad hoc reports. That is a very large workspace for iText. This reviewer expects to see many more copies of the new edition out there than there were original ones.

All in all, the book is well written and the examples are vastly improved over the first book. If you are creating a system for generating ad hoc reports, programmatically generating PDFs on the fly for web or other applications, modifying existing PDFs without their original documentation or doing just about anything else with PDFs, this is the book you need. Highly recommended.

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