Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 21 Days with CD-ROM

Currently I am a freshy in college and taking computer science but the problem is I wasn't much familier with all these computer languages, but I did know Visual Basic and pascal very good and had work with these 2 programming languages. I am taking java corse in schoool next semister so I thought I would just get my hands on java and see what it is and I ended up buying 3 books on java and what I found was that this book is great for beginers, Again ONLY GOOD FOR BEGINERS, the compiler (jdk) which comes with this book is not user freindly but you always can download the newer and much better version of jdk from sun.java.com ...... that's what I did. Well after all if you have a little bite of programming knowledge in VB, C or pascal this book will teach you JAVA, I am talking about JAVA... but see this book claims that you can finish it up in 21 days but try not to finish up in 21 days, I finished up in about 2 months, java is not like VB you have to spend some time with it and just play with it. I can Say now that I know JAVA.

I felt Laura Lemay did a great job for the first 13 chapters, she has a way with words. The remaining chapters were understandable, but some of the concepts were relatively muddled. Perhaps multiple authors (including Laura) on most of those were the cause. (And perhaps it was simply that I read the book without coding any of it. What I'm saying is: It's so well written, this PowerBuilder developer learned Java without sitting in front of a tube). The final chapter, "Under the Hood", lived up to its title and tied it all together well. I picked up and layed down several other Java books due to frustration over bad grammar, redundancy, editing mistakes or ludicrous example code. This doesn't suffer from those problems. Very good read, overall. Can't wait to dig into "Teach Yourself Java 2 Platform in 21 Days".

I'm reading the spanish version of this book, and it's great for begginers with Java. I know C++ and I think that the book make interesting comparantions between these two languajes. The Java Development Kit attached at this book is unfriendly, but if you have a software like Visual J++, the learning proccess is interesting and fast.

This book is the ultimate java handbook for anyone, from beginners to advanced programmers. It covers everything java has to offer, and covers it well. Don't listen to any of the other reviews that put this book down. It is a great title, and every JAVA programmer should have one!

This book is one of the better introductory books to Java, especially for people who have done programming in some other languages. However, if you're serious about learning Java in a hurry, you should probably also buy a software package such as Symantec Visual Cafe, an integrated Java development and debugging tool.