Pro Java Programming

I really liked this book. The explanations are very clear and thorough. I agree with the previous review, that the book is a little SWING and code heavy. The SWING stuff is however just used as examples to explain a concept. The author is not trying to teach you SWING through this book. I guess that also the reason for longer code samples. Swing adds a few extra lines of code to each sample, but without that .. it might be difficult to follow through. Overall .. this is a good intermediate/advanced level book.

This book covers a grab bag of reasonably advanced Java topics. These include collections, XML, some database access, and Swing. Roughly half of the book is Swing. The first chapter, which covers library design, is solid. The exposition is solid, if a little dry. The illustrations are good. The book does rely a little heavily on code to do most of the expository work. I recommend having a look at this book in person before buying it. See if there is enough there on the topics that interest you to make it worth the purchase.