Java 2 Weekend Crash Course [With CDROM]

I used this to help me prepare for and pass the Sun exam. This is a good text for practicing many aspects of Java quickly. I found it to be a useful supplement to my library.

Disclaimer: I'm an expert Perl programmer with 5 years of work experience, plus a little over a decade of additional recreational programming between middle school and college graduation in C++, assembly, Pascal, and a few dozen dead & forgotten languages. So when I decided it was time to learn Java, I wasn't interested in yet another book aimed at beginners who need to have the difference between a method and a property explained to them. I wanted a book that I could casually dig through over the course of a few days and emerge with enough basic knowledge about Java to be able to do something useful with it and have enough of a foundation to be able intelligently search for answers to my new questions on the internet & elsewhere.It did a decent job. Within a couple of hours, I was at the point where I could head back to the bookstore to buy Hall's "Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages" and go forward from there.My biggest gripe about the book is its inadequate coverage of Strings. Specifically, little "gotchas" about Java Strings that will PARTICULARLY trip up Perl programmers... like the fact that a String being "null" is not the same thing as a String being "" and the need to explicitly test for both cases most of the time. Admittedly the book had to gloss over a lot in a small number of pages, but strings are just one of those fundamental things that need to be properly covered... I'm glad I bought it; it served its purpose. If you're an experienced programmer, the book is a good starting point and bridge between knowing nothing about the language's details and knowing enough to make good use of reference-oriented documentation. But if you're NOT an experienced programmer, god help you... because the book definitely won't. If you already understand fundamental concepts like integers, operators, if/then, for/next, classes, methods, properties, compiling, inheritance, etc., you'll appreciate the fact that the authors don't drone about them for 400 pages. But make no mistake... this book is intended to teach experienced programmers who have already mastered one or more object-oriented programming languages enough to feel like they can more forward after a "weekend"... and maybe BS convincingly about their java programming experience at a job interview a few days later. It's not going to teach somebody who thinks creating a HTML web page constitutes "programming" how to write useful Java apps in a weekend, a week, or any length of time.