Learning Java

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Pat Niemeyer, Jonathan Knudsen

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Pages: 976 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0596008732

Pub: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Pub date: 2005-05-20

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 72603

Editorial Review:

Java is the language de jour and there's a stream of books covering it, but with so many books available new offerings have to be something special. Learning Java starts at the beginning with a "hello world" style program to demonstrate using Sun's Java tools, and it continues to introduce features with examples. These are all thoroughly discussed and explained in as straightforward and jargon-free manner as practicable.
A tricky aspect of Java is the way classes are related, so it's great to see a whole chapter devoted to the subject early on. Even more opaque is the explicit use of threads in Java. Again, this is covered in an accessible way, especially the discussion on thread synchronisation. The authors cover basic graphics, video handling and other media in Java before moving on to Beans and the builder environment, stopping short of JavaBeans. The book finishes with a section on applets, the Java plugin and digital signatures. There is, though, no feeling of working toward a goal--perhaps this would have been a better book with a project as a theme. Another odd decision is ignoring the several--some free--Java IDEs generally used to program Java. (Neimeyer makes a point of saying he hasn't discussed them but without saying why. Even beginners find Java more accessible in a programming environment.)

Still, Learning Java, which uses Java2 v1.3, does a competent job of introducing Java to beginners. As with most O'Reilly books, it's authoritative, lucid and well edited, though it may fail to inspire in the reader the presumed enthusiasm for Java felt by the authors. You won't go wrong with this one, and its coverage of object oriented programming issues is particularly good --Steve Patient

Reader Reviews:

great book to get a firm handle on concepts and new features. (0/0 people found this helpful)

I've had this book (and still reading in it), but also had java in a nutshell with it, and I already knew older java versions. Both make a great combination. You can read the nutshell to get the basics fast, and then refer to this book when you want to go a little more in depth.

With this said, any new comer to java should know that there is no one book that has it all. For this book, it's good as a reference to the language and its concepts mainly, not the API.

Starts badly, gets brilliant (1/1 people found this helpful)

I hated reading this book at first. It starts with some examples to "show the power of Java" that made my eyes glaze over. The author(s) then spend far too much time talking about different ways to assign primitives and give a very crude introduction to Objects.

Then about a third of the way through, it gets a lot clearer and a lot better. The chapters on generics and threading are so good, I find myself referring to them even now. To be honest, I think that perhaps one of the authors is fantastic and the other is simply average... the quality of the chapters fluctuates wildly.

It is true that the authors try to cover everything, but I don't think you're supposed to remember everything that is said... it's more of a tour of the language and its standard libraries. I believe a tour of the IO, networking and GUI libraries is essential to anyone learning the language and am glad they were all covered. The evolving example of a simple web server is an inspired way to showcase most of the libraries.

The book only touches the surface of some basic principles (e.g. mutability, equality, generics, threads, exceptions, serializability, cloneability) but these are things that most experienced programmers do not fully understand and it gives a foundation to learn more... I'd seriously recommend Josh Bloch's "Effective Java" to follow this book once you feel comfortable writing in Java.

I would not recommend this book to a newbie programmer... it is aimed at those with experience in other languages but haven't touched Java. For example, if you don't know what an Exception is, you'd probably be best starting a little lower... probably with a SAMs book.

Not having fun (1/3 people found this helpful)

I bought this book with the expectation that it would have me flying fast - as did the "Learning Perl" book. But no: I am still crawling on my knees. Possibly because the authors attempts too much. They want you to know everything about Java, Swing, network, applets etc, but this is not suitable for learning.

And the more simple stuff is not clear: Casting basic types such as a string of digits to an integer, a byte to a char etc. How to read a line from the console? Can you append to arrays?

And further the book sucks as a reference. The index is useless because the footer/header does not tell you what letter you are under and for example the method listing spans several pages.

Before reading this book I thought was a consistent language, but now it just seems like a mess. I haven't got the idea of "factories", why do some classes provide a getInstance method and not a constructor? why all the trouble with bufferes, streams and buffered streams.

This book only served to confirm that I'm not having fun.

One of the best books for learning Java (11/11 people found this helpful)

This is one seriously good book.

One of the pitfalls of many Java books is that they assume a level of familiarity with programming (especially C or C++) and that you will come across sentences such as "java does not have pointers" with no explanation of what a pointer is. A good book will give you directions to find out this missing information but a great book will explain everything for you. While not perfect in its coverage of these essentials, this is where this book really scores highly. It takes you through the basics of object orientated programming starting with simple examples and working up to more advanced ones which demonstrate the power and flexibility of Java.

For people with some experience of programming (no matter how small) this is the best book to learn Java from. For those coming to programming for the first time, you might be better served by "Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days" from Sams which deals with the basics with a little more depth. As an experienced developer, these are the 2 books I would recommend for those looking to learn Java.

Which ever book you decide to buy, you should also consider getting the superb "Java Cookbook" from O'Reilly where you see how Java code can be used in various situations (especially if you are the type who learns from seeing how things are really done).

Worth every penny. (7/8 people found this helpful)

If you wish to learn Java this is definitely the book for you. It is aimed at the java beginner or even people beginning programming. The book is very well laid out and the examples are clear and concise making them easy to understand.
This book doesn't leave my side whilst programming in Java and I highly recommend it to anyone learning Java, especially students on Comp Sci. degrees. This SHOULD be the recommended text.

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