Java by Dissection: The Essentials of Java Programming [With On to C Book]

One of the worst qualities of computer books is their length. For some reason most books decide to talk about functions for 189 pages and what an integer is for 35. This book offers a clear introduction to the java language and manages to be less than an inch thick. The book is very well formatted and ordered and is pretty pleasant to read. And thankfully it is content to give one good sized example rather than 6 long cryptic ones. However it is not an effective advanced reference. It fails to talk about RMI, JNI and reflection which are very useful advanced concepts that I would like to hear about from these authors.

This is a superb book for novice with some programming knowledge. It's not for those that picked up a programming book for the very first time - in another word, a virgin. The book stands out in term of example explaination. Greatly recommended by a computer science student! UCSC RULES!!

I used this book to learn Java and found it very clear. It provides more of an introduction to programming than Sun's online tutorial. If you are already familiar with programming in C++, you can probably skip the first few chapters. The more advanced topics in the rest of the book prepares you to effectively use Sun's online tutorial for the more specialized uses of Java.

The book is available and as the author I would suggest you come to cse.ucsc.edu/~pohl and look for the first three chapters which are downloadable as pdf to see if this suits your taste. Key features are teaching by dissection, just like my other books; several advanced examples using SWING and threading with a great introduction to synchronization largely written by Charlie McDowell an expert in this area; and our own terminal IO package.